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THE LIFE 

OF 

SA^.'LbL lOHNSON 



BY 



LORD iMACAULAY 



^J>^ 



New'^rk; Cincinnati • Chic^^o- 

American-Book- Company- 



£SsS 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



ECLECTIC ENGLISH CLASSICS 



THE LIFE 



OF 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 



BY 



LORD MACAULAY 




(^Ou 



NEW YORK •:• CINCINNATI ■:• CHICAGO 

AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY 
1895 



Copyright, 1895, by 
American Book Company. 

LIFE OF JOHNSON. 
M. 1. 



INTRODUCTION. 



Thomas Babington Macaulay, the most popular essayist of 
his time, was born at Leicestershire, Eng., in 1800. His father, 
Zachary Macaulay, a friend and coworker of Wilberforce, was a 
man of austere character, who was gi^eatly shocked at his son's 
fondness for worldly hterature. Macaulay's mother, however, 
encouraged his reading, and did much to foster his literary tastes. 

" From the time that he was three," says Trev^elyan in his stand- 
ard biography, " Macaulay read incessantly, for the most part 
lying on the rug before the fire, with his book on the ground and a 
piece of bread and butter in his hand." He early showed marks 
of uncommon genius. When he was only seven, he took it into 
his head to write a " Compendium of Universal History." He 
could remember almost the exact phraseology of the books he 
read, and had Scott's " Marmion " almost entirely by heart. His 
omnivorous reading and extraordinary memory bore ample fruit 
in the richness of allusion and briUiancy of illustration that marked 
the literary style of his mature years. He could have written " Sir 
Charles Grandison " from memory, and in 1849 he could repeat 
more than half of " Paradise Lost." 

In 1 818 Macaulay entered Trinity College, Cambridge. Here 
he won prizes in classics and English ; but he had an invincible 
distaste for mathematics. 

5 



6 INTRODUCTION. 

His " Essay on Milton," published in the " Edinburgh Review " 
in 1825, made him famous; and his subsequent contributions to 
that magazine, written in all the vigor of his early years, were 
eagerly and widely read. Among the best of his essays are those 
on " Clive," " Warren Hastings," " Frederick the Great," " Addi- 
son," " Bunyan," and " Comic Dramatists of the Restoration." 

Macaulay possessed great versatility, and made a reputation 
not only as an essayist, but also as a statesman, orator, poet, and 
historian. Known as a stanch Whig, he entered Parliament in 
1830, where his speeches on the Reform Bill placed him among 
the foremost orators of the day. He had, hoAvever, none of the 
outward graces of the orator. He spoke rapidly, and with but 
little emphasis. Yet Gladstone, who sat in Parliament with him, 
says, " Whenever he rose to speak, it was a summons like a trum- 
pet call to fill the benches." 

Many high political honors signalized Macaulay's prosperity. 
As member of the Supreme Council of India (1834-38), he did 
yeoman service for the cause of education and judicial reform. 
After his return from India, he became once more a member of 
Parliament, and held the office of secretary of war in the Mel- 
bourne ministry. Throughout his public career, he maintained 
his reputation as a true, courageous, and upright man. I )evoted 
as he was to literary studies, he never for a moment allowetl them 
to interfere with his official obligations, or, in fact, with any of 
the practical duties of life. 

Macaulay's " colloquial talents," to quote his language con- 
cerning Johnson, "were of the highest order." He was a fluent 
and fascinating talker, but generally assumed the lion's share of 
conversation. 

One of the most winning things about Macaulay was his love of 



introduction: 7 

children, with whom he had the utmost sympathy. The follow- 
ing is an extract from his diary, relating to a gorgeous valentine 
he had sent to his little niece Alice: "Alice was in perfect rap- 
tures over her valentine. She begged quite pathetically to be told 
the truth about it. When we were alone together, she said, ' I am 
going to be very serious.' Down she fell before me on her knees 
and lifted up her hands. ' Dear uncle, do tell the truth to your 
little girl. Did you send the valentine? ' I did not choose to tell 
a real lie to a child even about such a trifle, and so I owned it." 

In 1857 Macaulay was raised to the peerage as Baron Macaulay 
of Rothley, but lived to enjoy the honor a short time only. He 
died suddenly and peacefully on the 28th of December, 1859. 

Macaulay's fame as a poet rests on those specimens of stirring 
verse, " Ivry " and " Lays of Ancient Rome," which " every school- 
boy knows." His prose masterpiece, however, is the " History 
of England from the Accession of James II.," the first two vol- 
umes of which appeared in 1848. It was a labor of love, written 
in his more comfortable years, [after the competency derived 
from his Indian office had made possible for him a purely liter- 
ary life. ^It is original in treatment, and has all the charm of a 
fascinating novel. 

Macaulay's " style " was unquestionably " the man." He had 
strong likes and dislikes, and positive convictions. Like Dr. John- 
son, he never halted at halfway judgments, nor wore his opinions 
" on both sides, like a leather jerkin." Naturally, therefore, his 
language, impetuous and sanguine, is instinct with force and 
energy. Of a practical turn of mind, he saw clearly, and wrote 
clearly. Among the features of his celebrated style are the fre- 
quent use of antithesis and epigram to make one idea set off 
another, his fondness for the short sentence, his overflowing his- 



8 /.y /RODCCTIOX. 

torical and literary allusions, his mastery of paragraph stmcture, 
and his rapid and picturesque grouping of details. His jiictorial 
method popularized literary criticism, and kindled a great and 
permanent interest in English history and English literature. 
His essay on " Bunyan " set thousands re-reading "Pilgrim's 
Progress." Whatever his faults may be, though he sometimes 
exaggerates or overstates his case, nevertheless, in the stimulat- 
ing earnestness of his style, in his narrative power as an historian, 
in his originality and brilliancy as an historical essayist, he ranks 
with the masters of English prose. 

Macaulay contributed his " Life of Samuel Johnson " to the 
"Encyclopedia Britannica " in 1856. Twenty-five years earlier 
he had published in the " Edinburgh Review" a critical essay on 
Croker's edition of Boswell's Johnson. No extended contrast 
or parallel between these two articles of Macaulay need here be 
drawn. However, the harsher judgments contained in the essay 
are toned down in the " Life ;" and generally, in the treatment of 
Johnson, the "Life" breathes a more tolerant and sympathetic 
spirit than does the article of 1831, which was, in fact, largely 
inspired by Macaulay's burning desire to expose the editorial 
blunders of his personal foe, Cnjkcr. The present " Life," more- 
over, — written at the culmination of Macaulay's powers and in the 
maturity of his style, — shows the brilliant essayist at his best. He 
has been taxed, however, with party bias and with inappreciation 
of the deeper elements of Johnson's character. Matthew Arnold, 
on the other hand, maintains that Macaulay, strong ^^'h^g though 
he was, had preeminent qualification, not t)nly by virtue of his 
literary equipment, but also by many points of sympathetic re- 
semblance to the Tory subject of his narrative, to deal with the 
theme of the great literary dictator of the eighteenth century. 



/.VTRODUCriOX. 9 

In the " Life," as in the essay, Macaulay holds up to ridicule 
and scorn the character of Boswell, whose faults, like those of 
Cassius, seem to have been set in a notebook, conned, and learned 
by rote. His review of Boswell, however, is critical rather than 
biographical ; and as the name and fame of " the painter " have 
become so closely linked with those of " the subject of the por- 
trait," some brief summary of Boswell's life is appropriate here. 

James Boswell (1740-95), born at Edinburgh, was the eldest 
son of Lord Auchinleck, a Scottish judge. He studied at Glas- 
gow and Utrecht, and traveled e.xtensively on the Continent. In 
Corsica he made the acquaintance of Pasquale Paoli, the leader 
of the revolt against Genoa, and, returning to P^ngland (1766), 
he posed as the champion of Corsican independence. Two years 
later he pubhshed his " Account of Corsica." He was admitted 
to the Scottish bar (1766), but never applied himself earnestly to 
the practice of his profession. He married his cousin, Margaret 
Montgomerie, in 1769. 

Boswell's personality has made him one of the most amusing 
figures in English literary history. In his article of 183 1, Macau- 
lay says, " Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived. 
. . . He was the laughingstock of the whole of that brilliant soci- 
ety which has owed to him the greater part of its fame. He was 
always laying himself at the feet of some eminent man, and beg- 
ging to be spit tipon and trampled upon. . . . He exhibited him- 
self at the Shakespeare Jubilee (1769) to all the crowd which filled 
Stratford-on-Avon, with a placard round his hat bearing the in- 
scription of ' Corsica Boswell.' . . . Servile and impertinent, shal- 
low and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, 
and eternally bltistering about the dignity of a born gentleman, 



lo IXTRODUCTJOX. 

yet stooping to be a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common butt 
in the taverns of London, so curious to know everybody who 
was talked about, that, Tory and High-churchman as he was, he 
maneuvered . . . for an introduction to Tom Paine — so vain of 
the most childish distinctions, that, when he had been to court, 
he drove to the office where his book was printing, without chan- 
ging his clothes, and summoned all the printer's devils to admire 
his new ruffles and sword." 

Carlyle, in his essay on Johnson (1832), defended Boswell from 
the strictures of Macaulay. Indeed, what Macaulay stigmatizes 
as sycophancy, Carlyle deems a natural and honorable "hero 
worship " of Johnson. 

It was in 1763, in the back parlor of Tom Davies, a London 
bookseller, that Boswell first met his hero. Johnson unexpectedly 
came into the shop. Davies, seeing him through the glass door, 
announced his approach to Boswell nearly in the words of Hora- 
tio to Hamlet: " Look, my lord! it comes;" and then and there 
the agitated Boswell was introduced to the "monarch of litera- 
ture." " Recollecting Johnson's prejudice against the Scotch," 
writes Boswell, " I said to Davies, ' Don't tell win re I come from ! ' 
— ' From Scotland,' cried Davies roguishly. ' ]\lr. Johnson,' said 
1, 'I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.' He 
retorted, ' That, sir, I find, is what a very great many of your 
countrymen cannot help.' The stroke stuimed me a good deal." 

In this wav did Brobdingnag and Lilliput meet; and how this 
casual ac(iuaintance ripened into the closest intimacy is known to 
all. Boswell "is only a bur," said Goldsmith, "flung at Johnson 
in sport, and he has the faculty of sticking." 

Boswell's microscopic observation of his hero has been vividly 
described by Leslie Stephen: "When Johnson sj)oke, Boswell's 



INTK OD L'C 7 70iV. 1 1 

eyes goggled with eagerness ; he leant his ear almost on the 
doctor's shoulders ; his mouth dropped open to catch ever)' syl- 
lable ; and he seemed to listen even to Johnson's breathings, as 
though they had some mystical significance." 

In the painting of details, Boswell's prying curiosity stood him 
in good stead. Sir Isaac Newton, probably, was not more pro- 
foundly absorbed in his theory of gravitation than was " Bozzy," 
for the time being, in trying to ascertain (alas! in vain) the mys- 
terious reasons that prompted Dr. Johnson to treasure up the 
orange peel, and refuse to wear a nightcap. 

Vain and inquisitive as Boswell was, his perfect frankness and 
imperturbable good nature won him a welcome. Johnson called 
him " the best traveling companion in the world ; " and the sage 
had an opportunity to test the amiable qualities of his faithful 
Achates during their famous tour of Scotland and the Hebrides 
(1773). Boswell published an account of this journey in 1785. 

Boswell's masterpiece, "The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.U.," 
appeared in 1791. Regarding the literary and artistic merits of 
this famous work, the weight of modern opinion is, that the biog- 
rapher did not stumble upon his success by accident, but reaped 
it as the just reward of his systematic methods and unflagging 
zeal. He was uncrushable. " Sir," said Johnson to him on one 
occasion, "you have but two subjects, yourself and me. I am 
.sick of both." Boswell, pocketing the rebuke, hid his dimini.shed 
head, but continued none the less to gather his material for the 
biography, in which he has painted so vividly, not only the life 
of Johnson, but the life and manners of Johnson's time. 

The main incidents of Johnson's career, grouped as they are by 
the masterly hand of Macaulay, need no further portrayal. The 



^2 INTRODUCTION. 

characteristics of Johnson, however, his place in Hterature, and 
his relation to his age, are here reviewed. 

'I'he thought and action of any period of history are necessa- 
rily closely allied ; and only by the light of the times in which the 
famous dictionary maker lived can his prejudices and opinions 
be read aright. Accordingly one must place himself as far as 
possible amid Johnson's surroundings, with a sympathetic sen.se, 
moreover, of the literary and social conditions of the eighteenth 
century, of which, in many ways, the sage of Bolt Court was a 
vigorous embodiment. 

In its social aspects Johnson's age was rough and unrefined. 
The prevaihng coarseness of fashionable life is mirrored in the 
novels of Fielding and Smollett. The works of the shameless 
Aphra Behn were found on the toilet tables of the Belindas and 
Flirtillas of the day. Under the first two Georges, the passion 
for gambling reached its climax, fashionable ladies often playing 
for the highest .stakes. "Beau Na.sh," the "King of Bath," 
where he presided in the famous pump room, was a professional 
gambler. " Even wise old Johnson regretted that he had never 
learned to play cards." The immorality of the court (up to the 
reign of George III.) was notorious; while the amusements of 
the poi)ulace were brutal in the extreme. The newspapers of 
1730 contain an advertisement of "a mad bull, dre.ssed up with 
fireworks, to be baited." 

It was a time when men lived hard, and fought hard. In the 
field of debate and discu.ssion, no quarter was given nor taken. 
The buriy assertiveness and dogged courage that made Walpole 
premier were the prime requisites of the day. Of such a time, 
therefore, an aggre.ssive and rugged character like Johnson is 
in no small measure typical. The age might trample upon the 



lATRODUCTIOK. 1 3 

fastidious and delicate Gray ; but it could not trample upon the 
rough-and-ready dictionary maker, who was famed as a hard hit- 
ter in debate, and who on one memorable occasion had knocked 
down a bookseller, one of the ogres of London, for his intoler- 
able insolence. Few men, indeed, had the temerity to contend 
with Johnson. "There is no arguing with him," said Goldsmith; 
" for, if his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt 
of it." 

The coarseness of the age, however, but brings into stronger 
relief the high moral tone of Johnson's character; nor did the 
prevalent skepticism of the early eighteenth century shake his firm 
and abiding religious faith. 

Under the first two Georges, literature had a cheerless pros- 
pect. Walpole, famed as the Sir Visto of Pope and the Flimnap 
of Swift, despised reading ; while George II., invoked as " Augus- 
tus " by poetical flattery, grew furious at the sight of a printed 
volume, and wasted little love on what he called " boetry " and 
" bainting." Patronage there was, to be sure, for political scrib- 
blers like Arnall, of whom the author of the " Dunciad " wrote : — 

" Spirit of Arnall, aid me whilst I lie." 

But the royal favor did little to foster a genuine love of letters. 

Yet the years of Johnson's life (especially the first sixty years) 
belong to an era highly creative in English prose. In those 
memorable years appeared " Gulliver's Travels " (1729), with its 
pointed satire on the times of George I. ; " Pamela " (1741), the 
first English domestic novel in the modern sense ; Fielding's 
"Tom Jones" (1749); Smollett's delineations of the British tar, 
like Commodore Trunnion and Tom Bowling ; Sterne's delightful 
creations of Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim in "Tristram Shandy " 



1 4. INTK OD UC TIOK. 

(1760); Goldsmith's immortal " Vicar of Wakefield;" the histo- 
ries of Hume and Robertson, and a portion of Gibbon's " Roman 
Empire;" the "Wealth of Nations" (1776), that ranks "among 
the greatest of books ;" and the magnificent speeches of Edmund 
Burke. 

Johnson's connection with the production of Goldsmith's classic 
is a memorable incident in English literary history. One day 
(1764) "Goldy," as Johnson loved to call him, was arrested by 
his landlady for debt. Johnson, learning of his friend's sorry pre- 
dicament, sent him a guinea, and then hastily proceeded to Gold- 
smith's lodgings. There he found that the guinea had been spent 
for a bottle of Madeira, in which his prodigal friend was drown- 
ing his sorrows. Without a word, Johnson solemnly corked the 
bottle, and locked it up. Then Goldsmith pulled from a drawer 
the manuscript of the " Vicar of Wakefield," which Johnson, after 
examination, took to a bookseller's (with whom he was influen- 
tial), and sold for sixty pounds; and in this way was "Goldy" 
kept from the terrors of "the sponging house," and the story of 
Dr. Primrose launched on its long career of popularity. 

Some influences of Johnson's age are plainly discernible in his 
literary style. The pompous Anglo- Latin diction of the " Ram- 
bler " expresses the renewed fondness for classical learning in his 
time, and the reaction in English prose against the simplicity of 
Addison. The faults of Johnson's early style (Johnsonese) are 
attributable in general to " a use of too big words, and too many 
of them," and in particular to an extravagant use of Latin de- 
rivatives and abstract terms ; he employs antitheses even " when 
there is no opposition in the ideas expressed." The style of the 
" Rambler," however, differs much from that of his later years. 
The language of the " Lives of the Poets " (1777-81) iscompara- 



/.VTRODUCTJOA\ 15 

lively simple, and his conversation was racy with the plainest 
Anglo-Saxon. 

If, however, Johnson's age was rich in prose, it was poor in 
poetry. The " monarch of literature " lived between the Augus- 
tan age and the Victorian era. In his day the influences of the 
classical or Queen Anne school of poets were still predominant. 
There was no Wordsworth (i 770-1850) to interpret Nature in her 
every word, or to sing "the still, sad music of humanity;" and 
so, as a rule, the early Georgian poetry is satirical or didactic. 
Johnson's "Vanity of Human Wishes" (1749) is written in the 
style of Pope ; and he, moreover, only expressed the Augustan 
taste of the time in his bluntly avowed preference for Charing 
Cross and Fleet Street to all the beauties of nature. 

Conservative as he was, then, Johnson had no appreciative 
sense of the coming revolution in English poetry, — the revolution 
that found an early expression in the poems of some of his con- 
temporaries, "The Seasons" of Thomson, descriptive of natural 
scenery, and in the odes of Collins and Gray. Consequently, 
many of Johnson's literary judgments have been reversed in the 
present century. 

Among the conspicuous examples of his mistaken criticism are 
the condemnatory opinions of Milton and Gray. The diction 
of Milton's " Lycidas " he deemed harsh, and the numbers un- 
pleasing, while he styled Gray "a barren rascal." Yet in general 
Johnson bestowed high praise on the Puritan poet, and he did 
full justice to the best stanzas of Gray's " Elegy." 

Johnson's place in literature is unique. He is best remembered 
by the story of his life and conversation. His wit and wisdom, 
preserved not only by Boswell, but also in the " Johnsoniana " of 
Mrs. Thrale (Piozzi), Tyers, Cradock, Madame d'Arblay, Hannah 



1 6 IXTRODUCTIOX. 

More, and others, fill many entertaining and instructive pages. 
Ben Jonson, in his day and generation, had been a literary power ; 
Dryden had had his throne, and Addison (" Atticus"), his "sen- 
ate ; " but no other man ever reigned supreme in the world of 
letters as did Dr. Johnson in the fullness of his fame. Long will 
the sage Hnger in our memories as the central figure in the intel- 
lectual combats and passages at arms associated with the names 
of the Literary Club and the Mitre Tavern. 

Courage has been called the key to Johnson's character. His 
characteristic letter to the mighty Chesterfield is often quoted. 
Chesterfield, after long withholding his patronage from the strug- 
ghng lexicographer, angled for the " Dedication " when the dic- 
tionary was coming out, and tried to smooth over Johnson's 
long-cherished resentment by graceful compliments. 

" I have been lately informed by the proprietor of the ' World,' " 
writes Johnson, " that two papers in which my dictionary is recom- 
mended to the public were written by your lordship. To be so 
distinguished is an honor which, being very little accustomed to 
favors from the great, I know not well how to receive, or in what 
terms to acknowledge. 

" When, upon some slight encouragement, I first visited your 
lordship, I was overpowered, like the rest of mankind, by the en- 
chantment of your address, and could not forbear to wish that 
I might boast myself le vai?fq}/riir dii zfainqueu?- tie la tcrrc,^ that I 
might obtain that regard for which I saw the world contending ; 
but I found my attendance so httle encouraged, that neither pride 
nor modesty would suffer me to continue it. When I had once 
addressed your lordship in public, I had exhausted all the arts of 
pleasing which a retired and uncourtly scholar can possess. 1 
1 The conqueror of the conqueror of the earth. 



INTRODUCTION. i? 

r * 

had done all that I could ; and no man is well pleased to have his 

all neglected, be it ever so little. 

" Seven years, my lord, have now passed since I Avaited in your 
outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door ; during which 
time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties of 
which it is useless to complain, and have brought it at last to the 
verge of publication, without one act of assistance, one word of 
encouragement, or one smile of favor. Such treatment I did not 
expect, for I never had a patron before. 

"The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, 
and found him a native of the rocks. 

" Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on 
a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached 
ground encumbers him with help ? The notice which you have 
been pleased to take of my labors, had it been early, had been 
kind ; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot 
enjoy it ; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it ; till I am known, 
and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to 
confess obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be 
unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a 
patron which Providence has enabled me to do for myself." 

This famous letter dealt "patronage" a fatal blow. 

Johnson's prejudices are far-famed. Yet "that Jacobitism, 
Church of Englandism, hatred of the Scotch, belief in witches, 
and such like, — what were they but the ordinary beliefs of well- 
doing, well-meaning provincial Englishmen in his day ? " He 
was called a "good hater;" but he hved in an era of "good 
haters." In the earher years of his life, to be sure, a spirit of 
apathy or cold indifference, akin to the studied avoidance of the 
emotional in Augustan literature, had characterized pohtical and 

2 



IS INTRODUCTION. 

* 

religious thought ; but there succeeded a period of intense ear- 
nestness in national life, — the days of Pitt and Clive, Wesley and 
Whitefield. " Never before," writes Green, in commenting upon 
the year 1759, "had England played so great a part in the his- 
tory of mankind." Peace, moreover, as well as war, had its 
famous victories; and the Methodist revival "changed after a 
while the whole tone of English society." 

Johnson, then, represents the conservative side of his century. 
The political corruption under the Whigs, and the parliamentary 
bribery rampant during the leadership of Walpole, naturally tended 
to confirm Johnson's inherited Tory principles ; nor is it surpris- 
ing that he could not adjust the opinions and sympathies of his 
old age to more liberal tendencies or progressive movements. 

Of Whitefield's stirring eloquence he said, " His popularity is 
chiefly owing to the peculiarity of his manner. He would be fol- 
lowed by crowds, were he to wear a nightcap in the pulpit, or 
were he to preach from a tree." 

Johnson, however, outlived many of his prejudices. His 
hatred of the Scotch became a mere joke ; and some of his closest 
intimates were "Whig dogs." The stout old Tory even conde- 
.scended once to dine with Jack Wilkes, that notorious profligate, 
demagogue, and infidel. 

Johnson was a " clubable " man ; and his characterization of a 
tavern chair as the throne of human felicity signified his enjoy- 
ment of intellectual companionship, with " its feast of reason and 
flow of soul." As Garrick put it, Johnson " fairly shook laugh- 
ter out of you." He enjoyed romping games ; and it must have 
been rare sport to see the big-bodied philosopher, in his moments 
of recreation, playing hop, step, and jump, in which game he was 
reputed to be expert. 



INTRO D UC TION. 1 9 

In figure Johnson was tall and well-formed. He possessed great 
physical strength ; and many instances of his fearlessness are re- 
corded. Thackeray pictures h-im as "that great, awkward, pock- 
marked, snuff-colored man, swaying to and fro as he walks." 

He generally wore a suit of plain brown clothes, with twisted 
hair buttons of the same color, a large, bushy, grayish wig, and 
black worsted stockings. Upon his tour in Scotland he wore a 
wide greatcoat, with pockets in it almost big enough to hold the 
two volumes of his folio dictionary. In his time, men of rank and 
fashion displayed the most gorgeous attire. " Goldy's " absorb- 
ing passion for brilliant waistcoats is well known. Wilkes gener- 
ally arrayed himself in a scarlet or green suit edged with gold. 
Johnson himself, in his later years, became more careful in his 
dress, and, yielding to the persuasive influences of Mrs. Thrale, 
adorned his coat with metal buttons, and his shoes with silver 
buckles. 

The life of Samuel Johnson was " the victorious battle of a free, 
true man." His name is likely to be remembered "as long as 
the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe." 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON, one of the most eminent English writ- 
ers of the eighteenth century, was the son of Michael John- 
son, who was, at the beginning of that century, a magistrate of 
Lichfield, and a bookseller of great note in the midland counties. 
Michael's abilities and attainments seem to have been consid- 
erable. He was so well acquainted with the contents of the 
volumes which he exposed to sale, that the country rectors of 
Staffordshire and Worcestershire thougiit him an oracle on points 
of learning. Between him and the clergy, indeed, there was a 
strong religious and political sympathy. He was a zealous 
churchman, and, though he had qualified himself for municipal 
office by taking the oaths to the sovereigns in possession, was 
to the last a Jacobite ^ in heart. At his house, a house which is 
still pointed out to every traveler who visits Lichfield, Samuel 
was born on the i8th of September, 1709. In the child, the 
physical, intellectual, and moral peculiarities which afterwards 
distinguished the man were plainly discernible, — great muscular 
strength accompanied by much awkwardness and many infirmi- 
ties ; great quickness of parts, with a morbid propensity to sloth 
and procrastination; a kind and generous heart, with a gloomy 
and irritable temper. He had inherited from his ancestors a 
scrofulous taint, which it was beyond the power of medicine to 
remove. His parents were weak enough to believe that the royal 

1 An adherent of James II., or of his descendants ; from the Latin Jacohtis 
(James). 

21 



2 2 MACAULAV. 

touch was a specific for this malady.^ In his third year he was 
taken up to London, inspected by the court surgeon, prayed over 
by the court chaplains, and stroked and presented with a piece 
of gold by Queen Anne. One of his earhest recollections was 
that of a stately lady in a diamond stomacher and a long black 
hood. Her hand was applied in vain. The boy's features, which 
were originally noble and not irregular, were distorted by his 
malady. His cheeks were deeply scarred. He lost for a time 
the sight of one eye, and he saw but very imperfectly with the 
other. IJBut the force of his mind overcame every impedimentT 
Indolent as he was, he acquired knowledge with such ease and 
rapidity, that at every school to which he was sent he was soon 
the best scholar. From sixteen to eighteen he resided at home, 
and was left to his own devices. He learned much at this time, 
though his studies were without guidance and without plan. He 
ransacked his father's shelves, dipped into a multitude of books, 
read what was interesting, and passed over what was dull. An 
ordinary lad would have acquired little or no useful knowledge in 
such a way ; but much that was duU to ordinary lads was inter- 
esting to Samuel. He read little Greek; for his proficiency in 
that language was not such that he could take much pleasure in 
the masters of Attic ^ poetry and eloquence. But he had left 
school a good Latinist, and he soon acquired, in the large and 
miscellaneous library of which he now had the command, an ex- 
tensive knowledge of Latin literature. That Augustan ^ dehcacy 
of taste which is the boast of the great public schools of England, 
he never possessed. But he was early familiar with some classi- 
cal writers who were quite unknown to the best scholars in the 

1 Tliis superstition was widespread in Queen Anne's reign (1702-14). 
The newspapers of the time record that in one day — March 30, 1712 — two 
hundred persons were touched by the Queen. 

2 Athenian, the most highly cultivated dialect of the Greek tongue. 

^ Under Emperor Augustus (died, A.D. 14), Roman literature reached its 
highest point. The period of Queen Anne has been styled " the Augustan 
age " of English literature. 



THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON. 23 

sixth form at Eton.^ He was peculiarly attracted by the works 
of the great restorers of learning.- Once, while searching for 
some apples, he found a huge folio volume of Petrarch's ^ works. 
The name excited his curiosity, and he eagerly devoured hun- 
dreds of pages, t Indeed, the diction and versification of his own 
Latin compositions show that he had paid at least as much 
attention to modern copies from the antique as to the original 
models.3 

*^ While he was thus irregularly educating himself, his family was 
sinking into hopeless poverty. Old Michael Johnson was much 
better quahfied to pore upon books, and to talk about them, than 
to trade in them. His business dechned : his debts increased ; it 
was with difficulty that the daily expenses of his household were 
defrayed. It was out of his power to support his son at either 
university ;* but a wealthy neighbor offered assistance, and, in re- 
liance on promises which proved to be of very little value, Sam- 
uel was entered at Pembroke College, Oxford. When the young 
scholar presented himself to the rulers of that society, they were 
amazed not more by his ungainly figure and eccentric manners 
than by the quantity of extensive and curious information which 
he had picked up during many months of desultory, but not un- 
profitable study. On the first day of his residence, he surprised 
his teachers by quoting Macrobius ;^ and one of the most learned 

1 One of the famous schools of England. Walpole, Gray, Shelley, Fox, 
Canning, and the Duke of Wellington were educated at Eton. 

2 A revival of learning and classical study marked the great intellectual 
movement of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. The text 
alludes to famous scholars of the Renaissance, like Petrarch, PoHtian, Eras- 
mus, and Sir Thomas More. 

3 A celebrated Italian poet (1304-74). 

< Oxford or Cambridge, the two great English universities. Christ 
Church, one of the greatest and most fashionable colleges of Oxford, was 
established by Henry VIII. Pembroke College was founded in 1624; its 
library contains many memorials of Johnson. 

5 Roman grammarian (beginning of fifth century), and author of a series 
of essays. 



24 AfACAULAY. 

among them declared that he had never known a freshman of 
equal attainments. 
'^ At Oxford, Johnson resided during about three years. He was 
poor, even to raggedness ; and his appearance excited a mirth and 
a pity which were equally intolerable to his haughty spirit. He 
was driven from the quadrangle of Christ Church by the sneer- 
ing looks which the members of that aristocratical society cast at 
the holes in his shoes. Some charitable person placed a new pair 
at his door ; but he spurned them away in a fury. Distress made 
him, not servile, but reckless and ungovernable. No opulent 
gentleman commoner,^ panting for one and twenty, could have 
treated the academical authorities with more gross disrespect. 
The needy scholar was generally to be seen under the gate of 
Pembroke, a gate now adorned with his efifigy, haranguing a 
circle of lads, over whom, in spite of his tattered gown and dirty 
linen, his wit and audacity gave him an undisputed ascendency. 
In every mutiny against the discipline of the college, he was the 
ringleader. Much was pardoned, however, to a youth so highly 
distinguished by abilities and acquirements. He had early made 
himself known by turning Pope's " Messiah " 2 into Latin verse. 
The style and rhythm, indeed, were not exactly VirgiHan;^ but 
the translation found many admirers, and was read with pleasure 
by Pope himself. 

The time drew near at which Johnson would, in the ordinary 

1 A student in some English colleges (Oxford and \\ inchester), who jiays 
for his commons, and who is not, like a fellow, dependent on the foundation 
for support. There grew up at Oxford, students of many ranks, — noblemen, 
gentlemen commoners, fellow commoners, servitors ; but these grades are 
now practically obsolete, students being distinguished as " commoners" or 
" scholars " (students " on the foundation "). 

2 A sacred eclogue by Alexander Pope (1688-1744), in imitation of \'irgil's 
Pollio, first published in the Spectator. It is \\ritten in rhyming coujilets. 
" In reading several passages of the prophet Isaiah which foretell the coming 
of Christ," said Pope, " I could not but observe a remarkable parity between 
many of the thoughts and those in the Pollio of Virgil." 

3 Virgil (70-19 B.C.) was a celebrated Roman poet of the Augustan age; 
author of Eclogues, Georgics, and the ^"lineid. 



THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSOX. 25 

course of things, have become a bachelor of arts ; but he was at 
the end of his resources. Those promises of support on which 
he had reh'ed had not been kept. His- family could do nothing 
for him. His debts to Oxford tradesmen were small indeed, yet 
larger than he could pay. In the autumn of 1731 he was under 
the necessity of quitting the university without a degree. In the 
following winter his father died. The old man left but a pit- 
tance ; and of that pittance almost the whole was appropriated 
to the support of his widow. The property to whicli Samuel 
succeeded amounted to no more than twenty pounds. 
f His life, during the thirty years which followed, was one hard 
struggle with poverty. The misery of that struggle needed no 
aggravation, but was aggravated by the sufferings of an unsound 
body and an unsound mind. Before the young man left the 
university, his hereditary malady had broken forth in a singularly 
cruel form. He had become an incurable hypochondriac. He 
said long after, that he had been mad all his life, or at least not 
perfectly sane ; and, in truth, eccentricities less strange than his 
have often been thought grounds sufficient for absolving felons 
and for setting aside wills. His grimaces, his gestures,^ his mut- 
terings, sometimes diverted and sometimes terrified people who 
did not know him. At a dinner table he would, in a fit of ab- 
sence, stoop down and twitch off a lady's shoe. He w^ould 
amaze a drawing-room by suddenly ejaculating a clause of the 
Lord's Prayer. He would conceive an unintelligible aversion to 
a particular alley, and perform a great circuit ratlier than see the 
hateful place. He would set his heart on touching every post in 
the streets through which he walked. If by any chance he 
missed a post, he would go back a hundred yards, and repair the 
omission. Under the influence of his disease, his senses became 
morbidly torpid, and his imagination morbidly active. At one 

1 Of these motions or tricks of Dr. Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds said, 
" He could sit motionless, when he was told to do so, as well as any other 
man. My opinion is, that it proceeded from a habit, which he had indulged 
himself in, of accompanying his thoughts with certain untoward actions." 



26 MACAULAV. 

time he would stand poring on the town clock without being 
able to tell the hour. At another, he would distinctly hear his 
mother, who was many miles off, calling him by his name. But 
this was not the worst. A deep melancholy took possession of 
him, and gave a dark tinge to all his views of human nature and 
of human destiny. Such wretchedness as he endured has dri\en 
many men to shoot themselves or drown themselves. But he 
was under no temptation to commit suicide. He was sick of 
life, but he was afraid of death ; and he shuddered at every sight 
or sound which reminded him of the inevitable hour. In religion 
he found but little comfort during his long and frequent fits of 
dejection ; for his rehgipn partook of his own character. The 
light from heaven shone on him indeed, but not in a direct line, 
or with its own pure splendor. The rays had to struggle through 
a disturbing medium : they reached him refracted, dulled, and 
discolored by the thick gloom which had settled on his soul ; and, 
though they might be sufficiently clear to guide him, were too dim 
to cheer him. 

With such infirmities of body and of mind, this celebrated man 
was left, at two and twenty, to fight his way through the world. 
He remained during about five years in the midland counties. 
At Lichfield, his birthplace and his early home, he had inherited 
some friends, and acquired others. He was kindly noticed by 
Henry Hervey,i a gay officer of noble family, who happened 
to be quartered there. Gilbert Walmesley,^ registrar of the 
ecclesiastical court ^ of the diocese, — a man of distinguished 
parts, learning, and knowledge of the world, — did himself honor 
by patronizing the young adventurer, whose repulsive person, 
unpolished manners, and squalid garb, moved many of the petty 
aristocracy of the neighborhood to laughter or to disgust. At 

1 The Hon. Henry Hervey, third son of the first Earl of Bristol : his 
eldest brother was Pope's Lord Fanny (see Note 4, p. 27). 

2 Author (died, 1751) of many Latin verses, translated in the Gentleman's 
Magazine. 

3 The Prerogative Court. 



THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON. 27 

Lichfield, however, Johnson could find no Avay of earning a 
livelihood. He became usher of a grammar school in Leices- 
tershire ; he resided as a humble companion in the house of a 
country gentleman ; but a life of dependence was insupportable 
to his haughty spirit. He repaired to Birmingham, and there 
earned a few guineas by literary drudgery. In that town he 
printed a translation, httle noticed at the time, and long for- 
gotten, of a Latin book about Abyssinia.^ He then put forth 
proposals for publishing by subscription the poems of Politian,'-^ 
with notes containing a history of modern Latin verse ; but sub- 
scriptions did not come in, and the volume never appeared. 

While leading this vagrant and miserable life, Johnson fell in 
love. The object of his passion was Mrs. Ehzabeth Porter, a 
widow who had children as old as himself. To ordinary specta- 
tors, the lady appeared to be a short, fat, coarse woman, painted 
half an inch thick, dressed in gaudy colors, and fond of exhibit- 
ing provincial airs and graces which were not exactly those of 
the Queensberrys ^ and Lepels.* To Johnson, however, whose 
passions were strong, whose eyesight was too weak to distinguish 
ceruse from natural bloom, and who had seldom or never been 
in the same room with a woman of real fashion, his Titty, as he 
called her, was the most beautiful, graceful, and accomplished of 
her sex. That his admiration was unfeigned cannot be doubted, 
for she was as poor as himself. She accepted, with a readiness 
which did her little honor, the addresses of a suitor who might 
have been her son. The marriage, however, in spite of occasional 
wranglings, proved happier than might have been expected. The 

1 Translation and abridgment of a Voyage to Abyssinia, by Father Lobo, 
a Portuguese priest (i 593-1 678). 

2 A Florentine poet and scholar (1454-94) ; author of poems in Latin and 
Italian. 

3 Catherine Hyde (died, 1777), Duchess of Queensberry, a celebrated 
beauty, was the eccentric friend of Gay. See Letters of Horace Walpole 
(to Conway, June 8, 1747). 

* A friend of Pope. She married Lord John Hervey (1696-1743), who 
wrote Memoirs of the Reign of George IL (see Thackeray's George IL). 



28 MACAULAV. 

lover continued to be under the illusions of the wedding day till 
the lady died, in her sixty-fourth year. On her monument he 
placed an inscription extolling the charms of her person and of 
her manners ; and when, long after her decease, he had occasion 
to mention her, he exclaimed, with a tenderness half ludicrous, 
half pathetic, " Pretty creature ! " 

His marriage made it necessary for him to exert himself more 
strenuously than he had hitherto done. He took a house in the 
neighborhood of his native town, and advertised for pupils. But 
eighteen months passed away ; and only three pupils came to his 
academy. Indeed, his appearance was so strange, and his tem- 
per so violent, that his schoolroom must have resembled an ogre's 
den. Nor was the tawdiy painted grandmother whom he called 
his Titty, well qualified to make provision for the comfort of 
young gentlemen. David Garrick,i who was one of the pupils, 
used many years later to throw the best company of London into 
convulsions of laughter by mimicking the endearments of this 
extraordinary pair, 

, At length Johnson, in the twenty-eighth year of his age, deter- 
mined to seek his fortune in the capital as a literary adventurer. 
He set out with a few guineas, three acts of the tragedy of " Irene "^ 
in manuscript, and two or three letters of introduction from his 
friend Walmesley. 

Never since literature became a calling in England had it 
been a less gainful calling than at the time when Johnson took up 
his residence in London. In the preceding generation, a writer 
of eminent merit was sure to be munificently rewarded by the 
government. The least that he could expect was a pension or a 
sinecure place ; and, if he showed any aptitude for politics, he 

1 The celebrated actor (1716-79). He was before all a Shakespearean 
actor, and (according to Lecky) did more than any other man to extend the 
popularity of Shakespeare. In 1741 he made his appearance in the ch.aracter 
of Richard III. Gray, in a letter (1741), says, " Did I tell you about Mr. 
Garrick that the town are horn-mad after ? There are a dozen dukes of a 
night at Goodman's Fields [Theater] sometimes." 

2 .See p. 40. 



THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON. 29 

might hope to be a member of Parhament, a lord of the treasury, 
an ambassador, a secretary of state. 1 It would be easy, on the 
other hand, to name several writers ^ of the nineteenth century, 
of whom the least successful has received forty thousand pounds 
from the booksellers. But Johnson entered on his vocation in 
the most dreary part of the dreary interval which separated two 
ages of prosperity. Literature had ceased to flourish under the 
patronage of the great, and had not begun to flourish under the 
pati^onage of the pubhc. One man of letters, indeed. Pope, had 
acquired by his pen what was then considered as a handsome 
fortune,^ and lived on a footing of equality with nobles and min- 
isters of state. But this was a soHtary exception. Even an 
author whose reputation was established and whose works were 
popular — such an author as Thomson,^ whose "Seasons" were 
in every library; such an author as Fielding,^ whose " Pasquin " 
had had a greater run than any drama since the " Beggar's 
Opera"*' — was sometimes glad to obtain, by pawning his best 
coat, the means of dining on tripe at a cookshop underground, 
where he could wipe his hands, after his greasy meal, on the 
back of a Newfoundland dog. It is easy, therefore, to imagine 
what humiliations and privations must have awaited the novice 
who had still to earn a name. One of the publishers to whom 
Johnson applied for employment measured with a scornful eye 

1 In the executive department of the English Government, the Treasury 
Board consists of four lords of the treasury and a chancellor of the exchequer. 
To the first lord of the treasury are usually assigried the duties of the prime 
minister. There are five secretaries of state ; namely, for the home, foreign, 
colonial, war, and Indian departments. 

2 Scott and Byron. 

3 Pope's translation of Homer brought him about nine thousand pounds. 

4 James Thomson (1700-48). See Introduction. 

5 Henry Fielding (1707-54), one of the greatest of English novelists; 
author of Tom Jones. Pasquin (1736) is a dramatic satire. 

6 An English ballad opera (1728) by John Gay (1688-1732). It was 
written to ridicule the Italian operatic style ; and its chief characters, high- 
waymen and pickpockets, are a satire on the corrupt statesmen of the day. 



30 MACAi'LAY. 

that athletic though uncouth frame, and exclaimed, " You had 
better get a porter's knot,i and carry trunks." Nor was the 
advice bad ; for a porter was likely to be as plentifully fed and 
as comfortably lodged as a poet. 

Some time appears to have elapsed before Johnson was able 
to form any literary connection from which he could expect 
more than bread for the day which was passing over him. He 
never forgot the generosity with which Hervey, who was now 
residing in London, reheved his wants during this time of trial. 
" Harry Hervey," said the old philosopher many years later, 
" was a vicious man ; but he was very kind to me. If you call 
a dog Hervey, I shall love him." At Hervey's table, Johnson 
sometimes enjoyed feasts which were made more agreeable by 
contrast. But in general he dined, and thought that he dined 
well, on sixpennyworth of meat and a pennyworth of bread at an 
alehouse near Drury Lane.^ 

The effect of the privations and sufferings which he endured 
'at this time was discernible to the last in his temper and his 
deportment. His manners had never been courtly. They now 
became almost savage. Being frequently under the necessity of 
wearing shabby coats and dirty shirts, he became a confirmed 
sloven. Being often very hungry when he sat down to his meals, 
he contracted a habit of eating with ravenous greediness. Even 
to the end of his life, and even at the tables of the great, the sight 
of food affected him as it affects wild beasts and birds of prey. 
His taste in cookery, formed in subterranean ordinaries '^ and 
aldfnoiie beefshops, was far from delicate. Whenever he was so 
fortunate as to have near him a hare that had been kept too long, 
or a meat pie made with rancid butter, he gorged himself with 
such violence, that his veins swelled and the moisture broke out 

1 " A pad for supporting burdens on the head." 

2 A London street communicating with the Strand ; near it, on Russell 
Street, is the celebrated Drury Lane Theater, first opened in 1663. 

' " Ordinary," i.e., " a place of eating cstalilished at a certain price." — 
Johnson : Dictionary. 



THE LIFE OE SAMUEL JOHXSOX. 31 

on his forehead. The aflFronts which his poverty emboldened 
stupid and low-minded men to offer to him, would have broken a 
mean spirit into s ycophancy , but made him rude even to ferocity. 
Unhappily, the insolence, which, while it was defensive, was par- 
donable and in some sense respectable, accompanied him into 
societies where he was treated with courtesy and kindness. He 
was repeatedly provoked into striking those who had taken liber- 
ties with him. All the sufferers, however, were wise enough to 
abstain from talking about their beatings, except Osborne, the 
most rapacious and brutal of booksellers, who proclaimed every- 
where that he had been knocked down by the huge fellow whom 
he had hired to puff the Harleian Library. 1 
1 _ About a year after Johnson had begun to reside in London, he 
was fortunate enough to obtain regular employment from Cave,- 
an enterprising and intelligent bookseller, who was proprietor and 
editor of the " Gentleman's Magazine." That journal, just enter- 
ing on the ninth year of its long existence, was the only periodical 
work in the kingdom which then had what would now be called 
a large circulation. It was, indeed, the chief source of parlia- 
mentary intelligence. It was not then safe, even during a recess, 
to pubhsh an account of the proceedings of either House without 
some disguise. Cave, however, ventured to entertain his readers 
with what he called " Reports of the Debates of the Senate of 
Lilliput."^ France was Blefuscu ; London was Mildendo ; pounds 
were sprugs ; the Duke of Newcastle ^ was the Nardac secretary 
of state ; Lord Hardwicke ^ was the Hugo Hickrad ; and WiUiam 
T- PulteneyS was Wingul Pulnub. To write the speeches was, dur- 

1 The celebrated collection of books made by the Earl of Oxford (Henry 
Harley), purchased by Osborne for thirteen thousand pounds (see Note 2, 
p. 59)- 2 Edward Cave (1691-1754). 

3 The name is taken from Swift's Gulliver's Travels. 

* A famous Whig statesman (1693-1768), secretary of state and premier : 
he formed a coalition with Pitt (1757). See Macaulay's Chatham. 

5 Whigstatesman (1690-1764) : aslordchancellor he won a high reputation. 

6 Famous Whig leader (1684-1764), at first a friend of Walpole, but after- 
ward the head of the faction called " the. Patriots ; " created Earl of Bath. 



32 A/ACAi'LAY. 

ing several years, the business of Johnson. He was generally 
furnished with notes — meager indeed, and inaccurate — of what 
had been said ; but sometimes he had to find arguments and 
eloquence, both for the ministry and for the opposition. He was 
himself a Tory,^ not from rational conviction, — for his serious 
opinion was, that one form of government was just as good or as 
bad as another, — but from mere passion, such as inflamed the 
Capulets against the Montagues,- or the Blues of the Roman 
circus against the Greens.^ In his infancy he had heard so much 
talk about the villainies of the Whigs* and the dangers of the 
Church, that he had become a furious partisan when he could 
scarcely speak. Before he was three, he had insisted on being 
taken to hear Sacheverell •'"' preach at Lichfield Cathedral, and had 
listened to the sermon with as much respect, and probably with 
as much intelligence, as any Staffordshire squire in the congre- 
gation. The work which had been begun in the nursery had been 
completed by the university. Oxford, when Johnson resided 
there, was the most Jacobitical place in England ; and Pembroke 
was one of the most Jacobitical colleges in Oxford. The 
prejudices which he brought up to London were scarcely less 
absurd than those of his own Tom Tempest. •* Charles II. 
and James II.'' were two of the best kings that ever reigned. 

1 The Tories were tlie pe.ice jiarty in Queen Anne's reign, and had a 
strong ally in the Church. During Johnson's earlier years (1712-42) the 
Whigs ruled England. 

'^ In Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, the families of the two lovers, the 
Montagues and the Capulets, cherish an hereditary feud. 

•^ For an account of the circus factions at Constantinople, see Gibbon's 
Roman Empire, chap. xli. 

* Of the two great political parties, the Whigs were the more liberal. 
They defended the revolution of 1688, and favored the Hanoverian suc- 
cession. 

s Dr. Henry Sacheverell (1672-1724) a High-church divine who preached 
in severe terms against the Whig administration. He was impeached (1710), 
and suspended from office for three years. 

6 A bigoted and noisy partisan. For the character, see Idler No. 10. 

7 Charles II. reigned 1660-85; and James II., 1685-88. 



THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOILXSON. 33 

Laud,i a poor creature who never did, said, or wrote anything indi- 
cating more than the ordinary capacity of an old woman, was a 
prodigy of parts and learning, over whose tomb Art and Genius - 
still continued to weep. Hampden-^ deserved no more honorable 
name than that of " the zealot of rebellion." Even the ship money,'* 
condemned not less decidedly by Falkland ^ and Clarendon ^ than 
by the bitterest Roundiieads,'^ Johnson would not pronounce to 
have been an unconstitutional impost. Under a government the 
mildest that had ever been known in the world, under a govern- 
ment which allowed to the people an unprecedented liberty of 
speech and action, he fancied that he was a slave ; he assailed the 
ministry with obloquy which refuted itself, and regretted the lost 
freedom and happiness of those golden days in which a writer 
who had taken but one-tenth part of the license allowed to him 
would have been pilloried, mangled with the shears, whipped 
at the cart's tail, and flung into a noisome dungeon to die. He 
hated dissenters and stockjobbers, the excise and the army, 
septennial parliaments and continental connections. He long 
had an aversion to the Scotch, an aversion of which he could 
not remember the commencement, but which, he owned, had 
probably originated in his abhorrence of the conduct of the 
nation during the Great RebeUion.^ It is easy to guess in what 
manner debates on great party questions were likely to be re- 

1 Archbishop Laud (1573-1645), the persecutor of the Puritans. He was 
impeached and executed. 

2 "Around his tomb let Art and Genius weep." — Vanity 0/ Human 
IVishes, line 173. 

3 John Hampden (1594-1643), celebrated leader of the patriotic party 
against Charles I. 

■t An arbitrary tax imposed by Charles I., first introduced in 1634. The 
tax was levied on the whole kingdom, and the money raised was expended 
on the navy. 

5 A Royalist leader (1610-43) in the civil war. 

^, A Royalist statesman (1608-74), author of a history of the civil war. 

"^ A name given in derision by the Royalists to the Puritans and Independ- 
ents. 

^ The civil war against Charles I., begun in 1642. 

3 



34 jMACALLAY. 

ported by a man whose judgment was so much disordered by 
party spirit. A show of fairness was, indeed, necessary to tlie 
prosperity of the magazine. But Jolmson long afterwards owned, 
that, thougli he had saved apjicarances, he had taken care that 
the Whig dogs should not have the best of it ; and, in fact, 
every passage which has lived, every passage .which bears the 
marks of his higher faculties, is put into the mouth of some 
member of the opposition. 

'-- A few weeks after Johnson had entered on these obscure 
labors, he published a work which at once placed him high among 
the writers of his age. It is j'robable that what he had suffered 
during his first year in London had often reminded him of some 
parts of that noble poem in which Juvenal ' had described the 
misery and degradation of a needy man of letters, lodged among 
the pigeons' nests in the tottering garrets which overhung 
the streets of Rome. Pope's admirable imitations of Horace's "-^ 
"Satires" and " Epistles" had recently appeared, were in every 
hand, and were by many readers thought superior to the originals. 
What Pope had done for Horace, Johnson aspired to do for 
Juvenal. The enterprise was bold, and yet judicious. For be- 
tween Johnson and Juvenal there was much in common, — much 
more, certainly, than between Pope and Horace. 

i^r Johnson's " London " appeared without his name in May, i 738. 
He received only ten guineas for this stately and vigorous poem ; 
but the sale was rapid, and the success complete. A second 
edition was required within a week. Those small critics who 
are always desirous to lower established reputations, ran about 
proclaiming that the anonymous satirist was superior to Pope in 
Pope's own peculiar department of literature. It ought to be 
remembered, to the honor of Pope, that he joined heartily in 
the applause with which the appearance of a rival genius was 

1 A famous Roman satirist (about A.D. 60-140). The allusion is to liis 
Third Satire. 

2 A famous poet (65-8 B.C.), whose ocles, epistles, and satires show the 
Latin tongue in its perfection. Pope's Moral Essays and Satires are Horatian. 



THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHXSOX. 35 

welcomed. He made inquiries about the author of " London." 
Such a man, he said, could not long be concealed. The narae 
was soon discovered ; and Pope, with great kindness, exerted him- 
self to obtain an academical degree, and the mastership of a 
grammar school, for the poor young poet. The attempt failed, 
and Johnson remained a bookseller's hack. 

' ' It does not appear that these two men — the most eminent writer 
of the generation which was going out, and the most eminent 
writer of the generation which was coming in — ever saw each 
other. They lived in very different circles, one surrounded by 
dukes and earls, the other by starving pamphleteers and index 
makers. Among Johnson's associates at this time may be men- 
tioned Boyse,^ who, when his shirts were pledged, scrawled Latin 
ver.ses, sitting up in bed with his arms through two holes in his 
blankets, who composed very respectable sacred poetry when he 
was sober, and who was at last run over by a hackney coach 
when he was drunk; Hoole,- surnamed the metaphysical tailor, 
who, instead of attending to his measures, used to trace geomet- 
rical diagrams on the board where he sat cross-legged ; and the 
penitent impostor, George Psalmanazar,^ who, after poring all 
day, in a humble lodging, on the folios of Jewish rabbis and 
Christian fathers, indulged himself at night with literary and 
theological conversation at an alehouse in the city. But the 
most remarkable of the persons with whom at this time Johnson 
consorted, was Richard Savage,'^ an earl's son, a shoemaker's 

1 Samuel Boyse (1708-49), a forgotten literary drudge. 

2 John Hoole (i 727-1803), the translator of Tasso and Ariosto, received 
part of his education in Grub Street, being taught Ijy liis uncle, " Hoole the 
tailor," who is here alluded to. 

3 The assumed name of a literary impostor (about 1679-1763), who pre- 
tended to be a native of Formosa, and wrote a fictitious account of that island 
(1704), and afterwards applied himself to the study of theology. He is 
mentioned in Humphry Clinker. 

* Author of the Wanderer (born, 1698 ; died, 1743) : his poetical works are 
now forgotten. He was reputed to be the illegitimate son of the Countess of 
Macclesfield. 



36 .U.ICArL.-iy. 

apprentice, who liad seen life in all its forms, who had feasted 
among blue ribbands in St. James's Square, i and had lain with 
fifty pounds' weight of irons on his legs in the condemned ward 
of Newgate.^ This man had, after many vicissitudes of fortune, 
sunk at last into abject and liopeless poverty. His pen had 
failed him. His jjatrons had been taken away by death, or 
estranged by the riotous profusion witli which he squandered 
their bounty, and the ungrateful insolence with which he rejected 
their advice. He now lived by begging. He dined on venison 
and champagne whenever he had l)een so fortunate as to borrow 
a guinea. If his questing had been unsuccessful, he appeased 
the rage of hunger with some scraps of broken meat, and lay 
down to rest under the piazza of Covent Garden •* in warm 
weather, and in cold weather as near as he could get to the 
furnace of a glasshouse. Yet, in his misery, he was still an 
agreeable companion. He had an inexhaustible store of anec- 
dotes about that gay and brilliant world from which he was now 
an outcast. He had observed the great men of both parties in 
hours of careless relaxation, had seen the leaders of opposition 
without the mask of patriotism, and had heard the prime minis- 
ter roar with laughter, and tell stories not overdecent. During 
some months, Savage lived in the closest familiarity with John- 
son ; and then the friends parted, not without tears. Johnson 
remained in London to drudge for Cave. Savage went to the 
west of England, lived there as he had lived everywhere, and in 
1743 died, penniless and heartbroken, in Bristol jail. 
/ T Soon after his death, while the public curiosity was strongly 
excited about his extraordinary character and his not less extraor- 
dinary adventures, a life of him appeared, widely different from 

1 Not far from St. James's Palace, tor many years the most fashionable 
square in I^ondon. " Blue ribbaiuls " stands by metonymy for members of 
the Order of the Garter. 

2 A prison for felons ; destroyed and rebuilt several times. 

3 In Bow Street, Covent Garden, a square and marketplace in London, 
stands the theater of the same name. 



THE LIFE OE SAMUEL JOILXSOX. 37 

the catchpenny hves of eminent men which were then a staple 
article of manufacture in Grub Street. ^ The style was, indeed, 
deficient in ease and variety ; and the writer was evidently too 
partial to the Latin element of our language. But the little 
work, with all its faults, was a masterpiece. No finer specimen 
of literary biography existed in any language, living or dead ; 
and a discerning critic might have confidently predicted that the 
author was destined to be the founder of a new school of Enghsh 
eloquence. 

/]jThe " Life of Savage " was anonymous ; but it was well known 
in hterary circles that Johnson was the writer. Diu'ing the three 
years which followed, he produced no important work ; but he 
was not, and indeed could not be, idle. The fame of his abiU- 
ties and learning continued to grow. Warburton - pronotmced 
him a man of parts and genius ; and the praise of Warburton was 
then no light thing. Such was Johnson's reputation, that in 
1747 several eminent booksellers combined to employ him in 
the arduous work of preparing a "Dictionary of the English 
Language," in two folio volumes. The sum which they agreed 
to pay him was only fifteen hundred guineas ; and out of this sum 
he had to pay several poor men of letters who assisted him in 
the humbler parts of his task. 

The Prospectus of the Dictionary he addressed to the Earl of 
Chesterfield.^ Chesterfield had long been celebrated for the 
politeness of his manners, the brilliancy of his wit, and the 
delicacy of his taste. He was acknowledged to be the finest 
speaker in the House of Lords. He had recently governed Ire- 
land, at a momentous conjuncture, with eminent firmness, wisdom, 

1 " Originally the name of a .street in Moorfields in London, much inhab- 
ited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems ; whence 
any mean production is called gnibstreet." — Johnson : Dictiouaiy. Grub- 
street authors were satirized by Pope in the Dunciad. 

2 William Warburton (1698-1779), Bishop of Gloucester; a learned critic. 
^ Politician, orator, and man of fashion (1694-1773). He was renowned 

as a model of politeness, and his Letters to his son were accepted in his time 
as a manual of conduct. 



iS MACAfLAV. 

and humanity ; ami lie had since become secretary of state. He 
received Johnson's homage with the most winning affability, and 
requited it with a few guineas, bestowed, doubtless, in a very 
graceful manner, but ^-was by no means desirous to see all his 
carpets blackened witli the London mud, and his soups and wines 
thrown to right and left over the gowns of fine ladies and the 
waistcoats of fine gentlemen, by an absent, awkward scholar, who 
gave strange starts, and uttered strange growls, who dressed like 
a scarecrow, and ate like a cormorant. During some time, John- 
son continued to call on his patron, but, after being repeatedly 
told by the porter that his lordship was not at home, took the 
hint, and ceased to present himself at the inhospitable door. 

Johnson had flattered himself that he should have completed 
his Dictionary by the end of 1750; but it was not till 1755 that 
he at length gave his huge volumes to the world. During the 
seven years which he passed in the drudgery of penning defini- 
tions, and marking quotations for transcription, he sought for re- 
laxation in literary labor of a more agreeable kind. In 1749 he 
published the " Vanity of Human Wishes," an excellent imitation 
of the Tenth Satire of Juvenal. It is in truth not easy to say 
whether the palm belongs to the ancient or to the modern poet. 
The couplets 1 in which the fall of Wolsey - is described, though 
lofty and sonorous, are feeble when compared with the wonderful 
lines ^ which bring before us all Rome in tumult on the day of 

1 Lines 99-128. 

2 Thomas Wolsey (1471-1530), cardinal and jirinie minister of Henry VIII. 

3 Lines 56-80 (Gifford's translation) : — 

" The statues, tumbled down, 
Are dragged by hooting thousands through the town ; 
The brazen cars, torn rudely from the yoke, 
And with the blameless steeds to shivers broke. — 
Then roar the fires! the sooty artist blows, 
And all Sejanus in the furnace glows. 

" Crown all your doors with bay, triumphant bay ! 
Sacred to Jove, the milk-white victim slay ; 
For lo ! where great Sejanus by the throng — 
A joyful spectacle ! — is dragged along." 



THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON. 39 

the fall of Sejanus/ the laurels on the doorposts, the white bull 
stalking towards the Capitol, the statues roiling down from their 
pedestals, the flatterers of the disgraced minister running to see 
him dragged with a hook through the streets, and to have a kick 
at his carcass before it is hurled into the Tiber. It must be 
owned, too, that in the concluding passage the Christian morahst 
has not made the most of his advantages, and has fallen decid- 
edly short of the sublimity of his Pagan model. On the other 
hand, Juvenal's Hannibal ^ must yield to Johnson's Charles ; ^ 
and Johnson's vigorous and pathetic enumeration ' of the miseries 
of a literary hfe must be allowed to be superior to Juvenal's 
lamentation over the fate of Demosthenes '' and Cicero.** 

For the copyright of the " Vanity of Human Wishes," Johnson 
received only fifteen guineas. 

A few days after the publication of this poem, his tragedy, 
begun many years before, was brought on the stage. His pupil, 
David Garrick, had in 1741 made his appearance on a humble 
stage in Goodman's Fields, had at once risen to the first place 
among actors, and was now, after several years of almost uninter- 
rupted success, manager of Drury Lane Theater. The relation 
between him and his old preceptor was of a very singular kind. 
They repelled each other strongly, and yet attracted each other 
strongly. Nature had made them of very different clay; and 

^ Commander of the pretorian guard under the Roman Emperor Tiberius. 
He was put to death (A.D. 31) for his infamous crimes. 

'^ The famous Carthaginian general (247-183 B.C.) who crossed the Alps, 
and invaded Italy. 

3 Charles XII. of Sweden (1697-1718), famous for his military genius. 
Johnson portrays Charles's ambition in lines 191—222 of the poem, ending: — 

" He left the name, at which the world grew pale. 
To point a moral, or adorn a tale." 

* " There mark what ills the scholar's life assail, — 

Toil, envy, want, the garret [Patron], and the jail." 

Vanity of Human Wishes, lines 159, 160. 

5 Greatest of Greek orators (died, 322 B.C.). 
^ Greatest of Roman orators (106-43 B.C.) 



tr 



y 



40 MACAU LA v. 

-rcircumstances had fully brought out the natural peculiarities of 
both. Sudden prosperity had turned Garrick's head. Continued 
adversity had soured Johnson's temper. Johnson saw, with more 
envy than became so great a man, the villa, the plate, the china, 
tlie Brussels carjiet, which the little mimic had got by repeating, 
with grimaces and gesticulations, what wiser men liad written ; 
and the exquisitely sensitive vanity of Garrick was galled by the 
thought, that, while all the rest of the world was applauding him, 
he could obtain from one morose cynic,^ whose opinion it was 
impossible to despise, scarcely any comphment not acidulated 
with scorn. Yet the two Lichfield men had so many early rec- 
ollections in common, and sympathized with each other on so 
many points on which they sympathized with nobody else in the 
vast population of the capital, that though the master was often 
provoked by the monkeylike impertinence of the pupil, and the 
pupil by the bearish rudeness of the master, they remained friends 
till they were parted by death. Garrick now l>rought "Irene" 
out, with alterations sufficient to disj>lease the author, vet not 
sufficient to make the piece pleasing to the audience. The pub- 
lic, however, listened, with little emotion, but with much civility, 
to five acts of monotonous declamation. After nine rej^resenta- 
lions, the play was withdra^vn. It is, indeed, altogether unsuited 
to the stage, and, even when perused in the closet, will be found 
hardly worthy of the author. He had not the slightest notion of 
Avhat blank verse should be. A change in the last syllable of 
every other line would make the versification of the " Vanity of 
Human Wishes" closely resemble the versification of "Irene." 
The poet, however, cleared, by his benefit nights 2 and by the 
sale of the copyright of his tragedy, about three hundred pounds, 
then a great .sum in his estimation. 

1 This name, now applied to a snapjiisli or sneering faultfinder, was origi- 
nally given to a Greek sect of philosophers noted for their coarse manners 
and surly disposition. 

'* The profits of every third performance of a play fell to the author as his 
benefit. 



THE LIFE OF SAMVFI. JOILYSO.V. 



41 



COl 

7f 



' ^ About a year after the representation of " Irene," he began to 
publish a series of short essays on morals, manners, and literature. 
This species of composition had been brought into fashion by the 
success of the " Tatler" and by the still more brilliant success of 
the " Spectator." ^ A crowd of small writers had vainly attempted 
to rival Addison.2 The "Lay Monastery," the "Censor," the 
" Freethinker," the "Plain Dealer," the " Champion," and other 
works of the same kind, had had their short day. None of them 
had obtained a permanent place in our literature ; and they are 
now to be found only in the libraries of the curious. At length 
Johnson undertook the adventure in which so many aspirants 
"had failed. In the thirty-sixth year after the appearance of the 
last number of the " Spectator," appeared the first number of the 
"Rambler." From March, 1750, to March, 1752, this paper 
continued to come out every Tuesday and Saturday. 
^^From the first, the " Rambler " was enthusiastically admired by 
a few eminent men. Richardson,^ when only five numbers had 
appeared, pronounced it equal, if not superior, to the " Spectator." 
Young 4 and Hardey^ expressed their approbation not less warmly. 
Bubb Dodington,« among whose many faults indifference to the 
claims of genius and learning cannot be reckoned, solicited the 
acquaintance of the writer. In consequence, probably, of the 
good offices of Dodington, who was then the confidential adviser 

1 The Tatler (1709) and the Spectator (1711) were projected by Richard 
Steele (i 671-1729). They mark the beginning of the periodical essay. 

2 Joseph Addison (1672-1719). essayist, famous for the ease, grace, and 
delicate humor of his style. Associated with Steele, he made the fame of the 
Spectator. In his day he also made a figure as a poet (Blenheim) and as a 
dramatist (Cato). 

3 Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), author of Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, 

and Sir Charles Grandison. 

4 Dr. Edward Young (1681-1765), author of Night Thoughts. 

5 David Hartley (1705-57). philosopher; author of Observations on 

Man. • . , Ti 1 

6 Lord Melcombe (1691-1762), courtier and politician; satirized as bubo 
by Pope. His Diary gives an insight into the Whig intrigues of the Ume. 



42 MACAULAY. 

of Prince Frederick, two of his Royal Highness's gentlemen car- 
ried a gracious message lo the printing office, and ordered seven 
copies for Leicester House.' But these overtures seem to liave 
been very coldly received. Johnson had had enough of the 
patronage of the great to last him all his life, and was not dis- 
posed to haunt any other door as he had haunted the door of 
Chesterfield. 

y By the public the " Rambler " was at first very coldly received. 
Though the price of a number was only twopence, the sale tlid 
not amount to five hundred. The profits were therefore very 
small. But as soon as the flying leaves were collected and re- 
printed, they became popular. The author hved to see thirteen 
thousand copies spread over England alone. Separate editions 
were published for the Scotch and Irish markets. A large party 
pronounced the st\'le perfect, so absolutely perfect, that in some 
essays it would be impossible for the writer himself to alter a 
single word for the better. Another party, not less numerous, 
vehemently accused him of having corrupted the purity of the 
English tongue. The be.st critics admitted that his diction was 
too monotonous, too obviously artificial, and now and then turgid 
even to absurdity. But they did justice to the acuteness of his 
observations on morals and manners, lo the constant preci.sion 
and frecjuent brilliancy of liis language, to the weighty and mag- 
nificent eloquence of many serious passages, and to the solemn 
yet pleasing humor of some of the lighter papers. On the ques- 
tion of precedence between Addison and Johnson, — a question 
which, seventy years ago, was much disputed, — posterity has pro- 
nounced a decision from which there is no appeal. Sir Roger, 
his chaplain and his butler, Will Wimble and Will Honeycomb, 
the " Vision of Mirza," the " Journal of the Retired Citizen," the 
" Everlasting Club," the " Dunmow Flitch," the " Loves of Hilpah 
and Shalum," the " Visit to the Exchange," and the " Visit to the 

1 Frederick, Prince of Wales (1707-51 ), son of George II., resided at 
Leicester House from 1737 until his death. He quarreled with his father, 
and became a member " of the opposition," against Walpole and tiie King. 



THE LIFE OF SAMi'EL JOIIXSOX. 43 

Abbey," are known to everybody. ^ But many men and women, 
even of highly ^cultivated minds, are unacquainted with Squire 
Bluster and Mrs. Busy, Quisquilius and Venustulus, the " Allegory 
of Wit and Learning," the " Chronicle of the Revolutions of a 
Garret," and the sad fate of Aningait and Ajut.'-^ 
^ The last "Rambler" was written in a sad and gloomy hour. 
Mrs. Johnson had been given over by the physicians. Three 
days later she died. She left her husband almost broken-hearted. 
Many people had been surprised to see a man of his genius and 
learning stooping to every drudgery, and denying himself almost 
every comfort, for the purpose of supplying a silly, affected old 
woman with superfluities, which she accepted with but little grati- 
tude. But all his affection had been concentrated on her. He 
had neither brother nor sister, neither son nor daughter. To him 
she was beautiful as the Gunnings,:^ and witty as Lady IVLary.^ 
Her opinion of his writings was more important to him than the 
voice of the pit of Drury Lane Theater,-^ or the judgment of the 
" Monthly Review." The chief support which had sustained him 
through the most arduous labor of his life was the hope that she 
would enjoy the fame and the profit which he anticipated from 
his Dictionary. She was gone ; and in that vast labyrinth of 
streets, peopled by eight hundred thousand human beings, he 
was alone. Yet it was necessary for him to set himself, as he 
expressed it, doggedly to work. After three more laborious 
years, the Dictionary was at length complete. 

1 See Spectator: No. 159 (Mirza) ; No. 317 (Journal) ; No. 72 (Everlast- 
ing Club); Nos. 584, 585 (Hilpa); No. 69 (Royal Exchange). Sir Roger 
and the other familiar characters and chapters of the De Coverley Papers need 
no special reference. 

2 See Rambler, Nos. 142, 138, 82, 22, 161, and 186 respectively. 

a The two Gunning sisters, — the Duchess of Hamilton and the Countess 
of Coventry, — famous beauties in the middle of the eighteenth century (see 
Dictionary of National Biography). 

4 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1 762), distinguished for her literary 
attainments and her Letters to Pope, Addison, and other eminent men. 

5 See Note 2, p. 30. 



44 MAC ALLAY. 

' ^ I It had been generally supposed that this great work would be 
dedicated to the eloquent and accomplished nobleman to whom 
the Prospectus liad been addressed. He well knew the value of 
such a compliment ; and therefore, when the day of publication 
drew near, he exerted himself to soothe, by a show of zealous and 
at the same time of delicate and judicious kindness, the pride 
which he had so cruelly wounded. Since the " Ram])lers " had 
ceased to appear, the town had been entertained by a journal 
called the "World," to which many men of high rank and fash- 
ion contributed.^ In two successive numbers of the "World" 
the Dictionary was, to use the modern phrase, puffed with Avon- 
derful skill. The writings of Johnson were warmly praised. It 
was proposed that he should be invested with the authority of 
a dictator, nay, of a pope, over our language, and that his deci- 
sions about the meaning and the spelling of words should be 
received as final. His two folios, it was said, would of course 
be bought l:)y everybody who could afford to buy them. It was 
soon known that these papers were written by Chesterfield. But 
the just resentment of Johnson was not to be so appeased. In a 
letter^ written with singular energv and dignity of thought and 
language, he repelled the tardv advances of his patron. The 
Dictionary came forth without a dedication. In the Preface the 
author truly declared that he owed nothing to the great, and 
described the difficulties with which he had been left to struggle 
so forcibly and pathetically, that the ablest and most malevolent 
of all the enemies of his fame, Home Tooke,^ never could read 
that passage without tears. 

' 'i The public, on this occasion, did Johnson full justice, and 
something more than justice. The best lexicograj)her may well 

1 Among the contributors were Chesterfield and Horace ("Horry") 
Walpole (1717-97). The editor was Edward Moore. 

2 See Introduction. 

3 The assumed name of Jolin Home (1736-1812), politician and philolo- 
gist; author of Diversions of Purley. He was tried for high treason, but 
acquitted (1794). He criticised Johnson's etymologies. 



THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHKSOX. 45 

V)e content if his productions are received by the world with cold 
esteem. But Johnson's Dictionary was hailed with an enthusiasm 
such as no similar work has ever excited. It was, indeed, the 
first dictionary which could be read with pleasure. Tlie defini- 
tions ^ show so much acuteness of thought and command of 
language, and the passages quoted from poets, divines, and phi- 
losophers, are so skillfully selected, that .a leisure hour may always 
be very agreeably spent in turning over the pages. The faults 
of the book resolve themselves, for the most part, into one great 
fault. Johnson was a wretched etymologist. He knew little or 
nothing of any Teutonic language exxept English, which, indeed, 
as he viTote it, was scarcely a Teutonic language ; and thus he 
was absolutely at the mercy of Junius- and Skinner.^ 
sCj The Dictionary, though it raised Johnson's fame, added nothing 

. to his pecuniary means. The fifteen hundred guineas which the 
booksellers had agreed to pay him had been advanced and spent 
before the last sheets issued from the press. It is painful to re- 
late, that, twice in the course of the year which followed the pub- 
lication of this great work, he w-as arrested and carried to spong- 
inghouses,^ and that he was twice indebted for his liberty to his 
excellent friend Richardson.^ It was still necessary for the man 
who had been formally saluted by the highest authority as dicta- 
tor of the English language, to supply his wants by constant toil. 
He abridged his Dictionary. He proposed to bring out an edi- 
tion of Shakespeare by subscription ; and many subscribers sent in 
their names, and laid down their money ; but he soon found the 

^ Many of the definitions \\-ere inserted in a spirit of humor and mischief. 
" Lexicographer " he defined as " a harmless drudge ; " and " oats " as " a 
grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland sup- 
ports the people." 

2 Francis Junius (i 589-1677), student of the Teutonic languages. 

3 Dr. Stephen Skinner (1623-67), lexicographer. 

* " A house to which debtors are taken before commitment to prison, 
where the bailiffs sponge upon them, or riot at their cost." — Johnson: 
Dictionary. 

5 See Note 3, p. 41. 



^1 



46 MACAULAV. 

task so little to his taste that he turned to more attractive employ 
ments. He contributed many papers to a new monthly journal, 
which was called the " Literary Magazine." Few of these papers 
have much interest ; but among them was the very best thing that 
he ever wrote, a masterpiece both of reasoning and of satirical 
pleasantry, the review of Jenyns's^ " Inquiry into the Nature and 
Origin of Evil." 
^^ In the spring of i 758 Johnson put forth the first of a series of 
essays entitled the " I/llei-." During two years these essays con- 
tinued to appear weekly. They were eagerly read, widely circu- 
lated, and, indeed, impudently pirated while they were still in the 
original form, and had a large sale when collected into volumes. 
The " Idler" may be described as a second part of the " Ram- 
bler," somewhat livelier and somewhat weaker than the first 
part. 

While Johnson was busied with his "Idlers," his mother, who 
had accomplished her ninetieth year, died at Lichfield. It was 
long since he had seen her ; but he had not failed to contribute 
largely, out of his small means, to her comfort. In order to 
defray the charges of her funeral, and to pay some debts which 
she had left, he wrote a little book in a single week, and sent off 
the sheets to the press without reading them over. A hundred 
pounds were paid him for the copyright ; and the purchasers had 
great cause to be i)leased with their bargain, for the book was 
" Rasselas." - 
^^2^'he success of "Rasselas" was great, though such ladies as 
Miss Lydia Languish-^ must have been grievously disappointed 
when they found that the new volume from the circulating library 
was little more than a dissertation on the author's favorite theme, 
the vanity of human wishes; that the Prince of Abyssinia was 
without a mistress, and the princess without a lover ; and that the 
story set the hero and the heroine down exactly where it had taken 

1 Soame Jenyns (1704-87), miscellaneous writer. 

- Rasselas; or, the Prince of Abyssinia, appeared in 1759- 

•^ A sentimental character in Sheridan's Rivals. 



THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOLLNSON. 47 

them up. The style was the subject of much eager controversy. 
Tlie " Monthly Review " and the " Critical Review " took dif- 
ferent sides. Many readers pronounced the writer a pompous 
pedant, who would never use a word of two syllables where it 
was possible to use a word of six, and who could not make a 
waiting woman relate her adventures without balancing every 
noun with another noun, and every epithet with another epithet. 
Another party, not less zealous, cited with delight numerous pas- 
sages in which weighty meaning was expressed with accuracy, and 
illustrated with splendor. And both the censure and the praise 
were merited. 

''-'About the plan of " Rassekis " little was said by the critics ; and 
yet the faults of the plan might seem to invite severe criticism. 
Johnson has frequently blamed Shakespeare for neglecting the 
proprieties of time and place, and for ascribing to one age or 
nation the manners and opinions of another. Yet Shakespeare has 
not sinned in this way more grievously than Johnson. Rasselas 
and Imlac, Nekayah and Pekuah,^ are evidently meant to be 
Abyssinians of the eighteenth century ; for the Europe which 
Imlac describes is the Europe of the eighteenth century; and 
the inmates of the Happy Valley talk familiarly of that law of 
gravitation which Newton ^ discovered, and w-hich was not fully 
received, even at Cambridge,^ till the eighteenth century. What 
a real company of Abyssinians would have been may be learned 
from Bruce's"* "Travels." But Johnson, not content with turn- 
ing filthy savages ignorant of their letters, and gorged with raw 
steaks cut from living cows, into philosophers as eloquent and en- 
lightened as himself or his friend Burke,^ and into ladies as highly 

1 Imlac the poet, Nekayah the princess, and Pekuah the favorite com- 
panion of the princess, are all characters in Rasselas. 

2 Sir Isaac Newton (i 642-1 727), greatest of English mathematicians and 
astronomers. 

3 See Note 4, p. 23. 

* James Bruce (1730-94), celebrated African traveler, 

5 Edmund Burke (1729-97), orator and statesman; friend of America. 



48 M.ICALLAV. 

accomplished as Mrs. Lennox ^ or Mrs. Sheridan,'- transferred the 
whole domestic system of England to Egypt. Into a land of 
harems, a land of polygamy, a land where women are married 
without ever being seen, he introduced the flirtations and jealousies 
of our ballrooms. In a land where there is boundless liberty of 
divorce, wedlock is described as the indissoluble compact. " A 
youth and maiden meeting by chance, or brought together by 
artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home and 
dream of eac^i other. Such," says Rasselas, " is the common 
process of marriage." Such it may have been, and may still be, 
in London, but assuredly not at Cairo. A writer who was guilty 
of such improprieties had Httle right to blame the poet who made 
Hector quote Aristotle,^ and represented Julio Romano^ as flour- 
ishing in the days of the oracle of Delphi, 
v^^f By such exertions as have been described, Johnson supported 
h;m.self till the year 1762. In that year a great change in his 
circumstances took place. He had from a child been an enemy 
of the reigning dynasty. His Jacobite prejudices had been ex- 
hibited with little disguise both in his works and in his conversa- 
tion. Even in his massy and elaborate Dictionary, he had, with 
a strange want of taste and judgment, inserted bitter and con- 
tumelious reflections on the Whig party. The excise, which was 
a favorite resource of Whig financiers, he had designated as a 
hateful tax. He had railed against the commissioners of excise 
in language so coarse that they had seriously thought of prosecut- 
ing him. He had with difficulty been prevented from holding 

1 Mrs. Charlotte Ramsay Lennox (i 720-1804), author of Female Quixote, 
and Life of Harriet Stuart. 

2 Mrs. Frances Sheridan (1724-66), motlier of tlie dramatist; author of 
Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulpli. 

^ .Shalicspcare (see Troilus and Cressida, act ii. sc. 2). Hector was tlie 
Trojan hero in the traditional siege of Troy; and Aristotle (dicil, .^22 B.C.), 
the most famous of the Greek pliilosoi^hers. 

* See Winter's Tale, act v. sc. 2. Giulio Romano (1492-1546) was a 
celebrated Italian painter. The oracle of Apollo at Delphi (Phocis, Greece) 
was famous in antiquity. 



THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON. 4(> 

up the lord privy seal ^ by name as an example of the meaning 
of the word " renegade." A pension he had defined as pay given 
to a state hireh'ng to betray his country ; a pensioner, as a slave 
of state hired by a stipend to obey a master. It seemed unlikely 
that the author of these definitions would himself be pensioned. 
But that was a time "o^wonders. George III. had ascended the 
throne,'^ and had, in tly; course of a few months, disgusted many 
of Tfhe o ld friends , and conciliated many of t hgt^ enemies, of his 
hou^e. xT he city was becoming mutinousll Q^xford was becom- 
ing loyal. Cavendishes and Bentincks were murmuring. Somer- 
sets and Wyndhams'^ Xrafe hastening to kiss hands. The head 
of the treasury was now^Lord Bute,* who was a Tory, and could 
have no objection to Johnson's Toryism. Bute wished to be 
thought a patron of men of letters ; and Johnson was one of the 
most eminent and one of the most needy men of letters in Europe. 
A pension of three hundred a year was graciously offered, and 
with, verj'^ little hesitation accepted. 

"This event produced a change in Johnson's whole way of life.^ ' *^ 
For the first time since his boyhood, he no longer felt the daily 
goad urging him to the daily toil. He was at liberty, after thirty 
years of anxiety and drudgerj'^, to indulge his constitutional indo- 
lence, to lie in bed till two in the afternoon, and to sit up talking^ 
till four \n the morning, without fearing either the printer's devinp /\^^ 
or the sherifFs ofhcer. , * 

\L One laborious task, indeed, he had bound himself to perform. 

1 The custodian of the privy seal, which is affixed to minor documents, and 
which is also used \\\ connection with the great seal of the government (the 
chief emblem of sovereignty). Johnson added to the definition of * ' renegade " 
the words, " Sometimes we say a Govirer;" but they were struck out by the 

printer. 

2 1760. 

3 The Cavendishes and Bentincks" were representative Whig, and the 
Somersets and Wyndhams representative Tory families. On the death of 
Queen Anne (1714), Sir William VVyndham built up a Jacobite party. 

■*. Earl of Bute (1713-92), a court favorite, and puppet of George III. Fie 
became premier in 1762. 
\ 



so ' MACAULAY. 

He had received large subscriptions for his promised edition of 
Shakespeare ; he had hved on those subscriptions during some 
years; and he could not, without disgrace, omit to perform his 
part of the contract. His friends repeatedly exhorted him to 
make an effort ; and he repeatedly resolved to do so. But, not- 
withstanding their exhortations and his resolutions, month fol- 
lowed month, year followed year, and nothing was done. He 
prayed fervently against his idleness ; he determined, as often as 
he received the sacrament, that he would no longer doze away 
and trifle away his time; but the spell under which he lay re- 
sisted prayer and sacrament. His private notes at this time are 
made up of self-reproaches. " My indolence," he wrote on Easter 
Eve in 1764, "has sunk into grosser sluggishness. A kind of 
strange oblivion has overspread me, so that 1 know not what has 
become of the last year." Easter, 1765, came, and found him 
still in the .same state. " My time," he wrote, "has been unprofit- 
ably spent, and seems as a dream that has left nothing behind. 
My memory grows confused, and I know not hoAv the days pass 
over me." Happily for his honor, the charm which held him 
captive was at length broken by no gentle or friendly hand. He 
had been weak enough to pay serious attention to a story about 
a ghost which haunted a house in Cock Lane,i and had actually 
gone himself, with some of his friends, at one in the morning, to 
St. John's Church, Clerkenwell,- in the hope of receiving a com- 
munication from the perturbed spirit. But the spirit, though ad- 
jured with all solemnity, remained obstinately silent ; and it soon 
appeared that a naughty girl of eleven had been amusing herself 
by making fools of so many philosophers. Churchill,^ who, con- 

1 Tliis story was \roven abont the adventures of a young girl in Cock 
Lane, London (1762), who pretended to be in communication with the world 
of spirits. As a matter of fact, Johnson assisted in detecting the im- 
posture. 

2 A northern district of London. 

' Charles Churchill (1731-64), poet and wit. He has all the bitterness of 
Pope. 



THE LIFE OF 8AM UEL JOHNSON. 51 

fident in his powers, drunk with popularity, and burning with 
party spirit, was looking for some man of established fame and 
Tory pohtics to insult, celebrated the Cock Lane ghost in three 
cantos, nicknamed Johnson Pomposo, asked where the book was 
which had been so long promised and so liberaUy paid for, and 
directly accused the great moralist of cheating. This terrible 
word proved effectual; and in October, 1765, appeared, after a 
delay of nine years, the new edition of Shakespeare. 
/*7 This publication saved Johnson's character for honesty, but 
added nothing to the fame of his abilities and learning. The 
preface, though it contains some good passages, is not in his best 
manner. The most valuable notes are those in which he had an 
opportunity of showing how attentively he had, during many 
years, observed human life and human nature. The best speci- 
men is the note on the character of Polonius.' Nothing so good 
is to be found even in Wilhelm Meister's- admirable examination 
of Hamlet. But here praise must end. It would be difficult to 
name a more slovenly, a more worthless, edition of any great 
classic. The reader may turn over play after play without find- 
ing one happy conjectural emendation, or one ingenious and 
satisfactory explanation of a passage which had baffled preceding 
commentators. Johnson had, in his Prospectus, told the world 
that he was peculiarly fitted for the task which he had undertaken, 
because he had, as a lexicographer, been under the necessity of 
taking a wider view of the English language than any of his pred- 
ecessors. That his knowledge of our literature was extensive, 
is indisputable. But, unfortunatelv, he had altogether neglected 
that very part of our literature with which it is especially desir- 
able that an editor of Shakespeare should be conversant. It is 
dangerous to assert a negative. Yet litde will be risked by the 
assertion, that in the two folio volumes of the " English Diction- 
ary " there is not a single passage quoted from any dramatist of 

^^ The royal chamberlain in Hamlet ; the father of Ophelia. 
2 Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749- 
1832), whose name is the greatest in German literature (see Bk. IV. xiii.). 



52 MAC A CLAY. 

the Elizabethan age,^ except Shakespeare and Ben.- Even from 
Ben the quotations are few. Johnson might easily, in a few 
months, have made himself well accjuainted with every old play 
that was extant. But it never seems to have occurred to him 
that this was a necessary preparation for the work which he had 
undertaken. He would doubtless ha\ e admitted that it would 
be the height of absurdity in a man who was not familiar with 
the works of ^^schylus and Euripides to publish an edition of 
Sophocles.^ Yet he ventured to publish an edition of Shake- 
speare without having ever in his life, as far as can be discovered, 
read a single scene of Massinger,-* Ford, Dekker, Webster, Mar- 
lowe, Beaumont, or Fletcher. His detractors were noisy and 
scurrilous. Those who most loved and honored him had little to 
say in praise of the manner in which he had discharged the duty 
of a commentator. He had, however, acquitted himself of a debt 
which had long lain heavy on his conscience, and he sank back 
into the repose from which the sting of satire had roused him. 
He long continued to live upon the fame which he had already 
won. He was honored by the University of Oxford with a doc- 

1 This great age of English poetry ended, strictly speaking, with the death 
of Queen Elizabeth, in 1603; but tlie name is extended to cover the period 
up to tlie Restoration (1660). 

2 " Rare Ben Jonson " (i573-l637). tlie most famous of the dramatists 
contemporary with Shakespeare. 

3 .-Eschylus (died, 456 B.C.), Sophocles (died, 406 B.C.), and Euripides 
(died, 406 B.C.) were the three great tragic poets of Greece. 

< Here follows a list of the most famous Elizabethan and Stuart dramatists : 
Philip iMassinger (1584-1640), author of A New Way to Pay Old Debts; 
John Eord (1586 to about 1639), auth<jr of Broken Heart and I'crkin War- 
beck; Thomas Dekker (about 1570 to about 1637); John Webster, a dram- 
atist of " intense and somber genius," who wrote Duchess of Malfi and 
VittoriaCorombona; Christopher Marlowe (1564-93), an early contemporary 
of Shakespeare, and author of Tamburlaine (in which he popularized blank 
verse), Edward IT., and Dr. Faustus ; and F"rancis Beaumont (15S4-1616) 
and his collaborator John Fletcher ( 1 579-1625 ). Beaumont and Fletcher, the 
most important of the Stuart dramatists, produced in tlic reign of James I. 
fifty-three plays, only thirteen being joint productions. 



J'JIE LIFE OF SAMi'EL JOJ/XSOX. 53 

tor's degree, by the Royal Academy ^ with a professorship, and 
by the King with an interview, in which his Majesty most gra- 
ciously expressed a hope that so excellent a writer would not 
cease to write. In the interval, however, between 1765 and 1775, 
Johnson published only two or three pohtical tracts, the longest 
of which he could have produced in forty-eight hours, if he had 
worked as he worked on the " Life of Savage'.' and on " Rasselas." 
"^4. But, though his pen was now idle, his tongue was active. The 
influence exercised by his conversation, directly upon those with 
whom he lived, and indirectly on the whole literary world, was 
altogether without a parallel. His colloquial talents were, indeed, 
of the highest order. He had strong sense, quick discernment, 
wit, humor, immense knowledge of literature and of life, and an 
infinite store of curious anecdotes. As respected style, he spoke 
far better than he wrote. Every sentence which dropped from 
his lips was as correct in structure as the most nicely balanced 
period of the " Rambler." But in his talk there were no pompous 
triads, and little more than a fair proportion of words in " osity " 
and " ation." All was simplicity, ease, and vigor. He uttered 
his short, weighty, and pointed sentences with a power of voice 
and a justness and energy of emphasis of which the effect was 
rather increased than diminished by the rollings of his huge form, 
and by the asthmatic gaspings and puffings in which the peals 
of his eloquence generally ended. Nor did the laziness which 
made him unwilling to sit down to his desk prevent him from 
giving instruction or entertainment orally. To discuss ques- 
tions of taste, of learning, of casuistry, in language so exact 
and so forcible that it might have l)een printed without the alter- 
ation of a word, was to him no exertion, but a pleasure. He 
loved, as he said, to fold his legs and have his talk out. He was 
ready to bestow the overflowings of his full mind on anybody who 
would start a subject, — on a fellow-passenger in a stagecoach, or 

1 The Royal Academy of Arts, instituted under the patronage of George 
III., Sir Joshua Reynolds being the first president. Its first meeting was 
held in 1768. 



54 MACALLAY. 

on the person who sat at the same table with him in an eating 
house. But his conversation was nowhere so brilliant and strik- 
ing as when he was surrounded by a few friends, whose abilities 
and knowledge enal)led them, as he once expressed it, to send 
him back every ball that he threw. Some of these, in 1764, 
formed themselves into a club,^ which gradually became a formi- 
dable power in the commonwealth of letters. The verdicts pro- 
nounced by this conclave on new books were speedily known 
over all London, and were sufficient to sell off a whole editicjn in 
a day, or to condemn the sheets to the service of the trunk maker 
and the pastry cook. Nor shall we think this strange when we 
consider what great and various talents and acquirements met in 
the little fraternity. Goldsmith - was the representative of poetry 
and light literature ; Reynolds,'' of the arts ; Burke, of political 
eloquence and political philosophy. There, too, were Gibbon,* 
the greatest historian, and Jones, ^ the greatest linguist, of the age. 
Garrick brought to the meetings his inexhaustible pleasantry, his 
incomparable mimicry, and his consummate knowledge of stage 
effect. Among the most constant attendants were two high-born 
and high-bred gentlemen, closely bound together by friendship, 
but of widely different characters and habits, — Bennet Langton," 
distinguished by his skill in Cjreek literature, b)' the orthodoxy of 
his opinions, and by the sanctity of his life ; and Topham Beauclerk," 

1 Tlie Literary Club, which met at the Turk's Head, Solio. 

2 Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74), poet, no^■clist, and dramatist. His \'icar 
of Wakefield is a famous classic. 

3 Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92), one of the most famous of English 
portrait painters. 

4 Edward Gibbon (1737-94), author of Decline and Fall of the Roman 
Empire. 

5 Sir William Jones (1746-94), scholar, Oriental linguist, and jurist. 

6 A scholar of amiable character (1737-1801), greatly beloved by Johnson. 
He succeeded Johnson as professor of ancient literature at the Royal 
Academy. 

7 Son of Lord Sidney Beauclerk, and grandson of the Duke of St. Albans 
(1739-80); "commended to Johnson by a likeness to Charles IL, from 
whom he was descended." 



THE LIFE Of SAMUEL JOHNSOX. 55 

renowned for his amours, his knowledge of the gay world, his 
fastidious taste, and his sarcastic wit. To predominate over 
such a society was not easy. Yet even over such a society John- 
son predominated. Burke might, indeed, have disputed the su- 
premacy to which others were under the* necessity of submitting. 
But Burke, though not generally a very patient Hstener, was con- 
tent to take the second part when Johnson was present ; and the 
club itself, consisting of so many eminent men, is to this day 
popularly designated as Johnson's Club. 
'33 Among the members of this celebrated body was one to whom 
it' has owed the greater part of its celebrity, yet who was regarded 
with little respect by his brethren, and had not without difficulty 
obtained a seat among them. This was James Boswel!,i a young 
Scotch lawyer, heir to an honorable name and a fair estate. 
Tliat he was a coxcomb and a bore, weak, vain, pushing, curious, 
garrulous, was obvious to all who were acquainted with him. 
That he could not reason, that he had no wit, no humor, no elo- 
quence, is apparent from his writings. And yet his writings are 
read beyond the Mississippi and under the Southern Cross,- and 
are likely to be read as long as the English exists, either as a liv- 
ing or as a dead language. Nature had made him a slave and an 
idolater. His mind resembled those creepers which the botanists 
call parasites, and which can subsist only by chnging round the 
stems, and imbibing the juices, of stronger plants. He must have 
fastened himself on somebody. He might have fastened himself 
on Wilkes,^ and have become the fiercest patriot in the Bill of 

1- See Introduction. 

2 A small brilliant constellation of the southern hemisphere, so called from 
the arrangement of its four principal stars. 

3 John Wilkes (1727-97), editor of the North Briton; several times ex- 
pelled from Parliament, and reelected from Middlesex. Though a notorious 
demagogue, he was nevertheless among the first to establish the right of the 
press to discuss parliamentary proceedings and public affairs, and he became 
for a time the popular idol. The Society for the Support of the Bill of 
Rights (1769) was founded to help Wilkes in his constitutional struggle with 
Parliament. 



$6 MA CA CLAY. 

Rights Society. He might have fastened lumseH' on Wliitefield,' 
and have become the loudest field preacher among the Calvinistic 
Methodists. In a happy hour he fastened himself on Johnson. 
The pair might seem ill-matched. For Johnson had early been 
prejudiced against Bos^vell's country. To a man of Johnson's 
strong imderstanding and irritable temper, the silly egotism and 
adulation of Boswell must have been as teasing as the constant 
buzz of a fly. Johnson hated to be questioned ; and Boswell was 
eternally catechising him on all kinds of subjects, and sometimes 
propounded such questions as, " What would you do, sir, if you 
were locked up in a tower with a baby? " Johnson was a water 
drinker, and Boswell was a winebibber, and, indeed, little better 
than an habitual sot. It was impossible that there should be per- 
fect harmony between two such companions. Indeed, the great 
man was sometimes i>rovoked into fits of passion, in which he 
said things which the small man, during a few hours, seriously 
resented. Every quarrel, however, was soon made up. During 
twenty years, the disciple continued to worship the master : the 
master continued to scold the discijile, to sneer at him, and to 
love him. The two friends ordinarily resided at a great distance 
from each other. Boswell practiced in the Parliament House of 
P2dinburgh, and could pay only occasional visits to London. 
During those visits, his chief business was to watch Johnson, to 
discover all Johnson's habits, to turn the conversation to subjects 
about which Johnson was likely to say somethings'remarkable, and 
to fill quarto notebooks with minutes of what Johnson had said. 1 n 
this way were gathered the materials out of which Avas afterwards 
constructed the most interesting biographical work^ in the world. 
Soon after the club began to exist, Johnson formed a connec- 



r|D 



1 George Whitefield ( 1 714-70), the great preacher of the Methodist revival. 
Wesley, the head of the Methodists, broke with Whitelield, who had 
" plunged into an extravagant Calvinism," and who became the founder of 
the sect called " Calvinistic Methodists." Whitefield, as a follower of John 
Calvin (1500-6.1.). accepted the doctrine of predestination. 

2 Sec Dr. llirkbeck Hill's edition (1887. 6 vols.). 



THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSOX. 5 7 

tion less important, indeed, to his fame, but much more impor- 
tant to his happiness, than his connection with Boswell. Henry 
Thrale, one of the most opulent brewers in the kingdom, a man 
of sound and cultivated understanding, rigid principles, and liberal 
spirit, was married to one of those clever, kind-hearted, engaging, 
vain, pert young women who are perpetually doing or saying what 
is not exactly right, but who, do or say what they may, are always 
agreeable.^ In 1765 the Thrales became acquainted with John- 
son, and the acquaintance ripened fast into friendship. They 
were astonished and delighted by the brilliancy of his conversa- 
tion. They were flattered by finding that a man so widely cele- 
brated preferred their house to any other in London. Even the 
peculiarities wliich seemed to uniit him for civilized societv — his 
gesticulations, his rollings, his puilings, his mutterings, the strange 
way in which he put on his clothes, the ravenous eagerness with 
which he devoured his dinner, his fits of melancholy, his fits of 
anger, his frequent rudeness, his occasional ferocity — increased 
the interest which his new associates took in him. For these 
things were the cruel marks left behind by a life which had been 
one long conflict with disease and with adversity. In a vulgar 
hack writer, such oddities would have excited only disgust ; but 
in a man of genius, learning, and virtue, their effect was to add 
pity to admiration and esteem. Johnson soon had an apartment 
at the brewery in Southwark, and a still more pleasant apart- 
ment at the villa of his friends on Streatham Common. A large 
part of every year he passed in those abodes, — abodes which must 
have seemed magnificent and luxurious indeed, when compared 
with the dens in which he had generally been lodged. But his 
chief pleasures were derived from what the astronomer of his 
Abyssinian tale called " the endearing elegance of female friend- 
ship." Mrs. Thrale rallied him, soothed him, coaxed him, and, 

1 In 1763, Hester Lynch Salisbury (1741-1821) married Henry Thrale, 
member of Parliament for Southwark. After Thrale's death (1781), she 
married Gabriel Piozzi, an Italian music teacher. Her Anecdotes of Johnson 
appeared in 1786. 



58 MALA CLAY. 

if she sometimes provoked him by her flippancy, made ample 
amends by h'stening to his reproofs with angehc sweetness of 
temper. When he was diseased in body and in mind, she was 
the most tender of nurses. No comfort that wealth could pur- 
chase, no contrivance that womanly ingenuity, set to work by 
womanly compassion, could devise, was wanting to his sick room. 
He requited her kindness by an affection pure as the affection 
of a father, yet delicately tinged with a gallantry which, though 
awkward, must have been more flattering than the attentions of 
a crowd of the fools who gloried in the names, now obsolete, of 
buck and maccaroni.^ It should seem that a full half of John- 
son's life, during about sixteen years, was passed under the roof 
of the Thrales. He accompanied the family sometimes to Bath,^ 
and sometimes to Brighton,^ once to Wales, and once to Paris.* 
But he had at the same time a house in one of the narrow and 
gloomy courts^ on the north of Fleet Street. In the garrets was 
his library, a large and miscellaneous collection of books, falling 
to pieces, and begrimed with dust. On a lower floor he some- 
times, but very rarely, regaled a friend with a plain dinner, — a 
veal pie, or a leg of lamb and spinach, and a rice pudding. Nor 
was the dwelling uninhabited during his long absences. It was 
the home of the most extraordinary assemblage of inmates that 
ever was brought together. At the head of the establishment, 
John.son had placed an old lady named Williams, whose chief 
recommendations were her bhndness and her poverty. But, in 
spite of her murmurs and reproaches, he gave an asylum to an- 
other lady who was as poor as herself, Mrs. Desmoulins, whose 
family he had known many years before in Staffordshire. Room 

1 Fop or dandy (see Century Dictionary). 

2 One of the leading watering places of England ; especially noted in the 
eighteenth century, when Beau Nasli was master of ceremonies, or " King 
of Bath " (see Goldsmith's Life of Richard Nash). 

3 On the English Channel ; now the leading seaside resort in Great 
Britain. * In 1775. 

5 Bolt Court, where Johnson lived from 1776 up to the time of his death. 



THE LIFE OF SAM i EL JOJEVSOX. 59 

was found for the daughter of Mrs. DesmouUns, and for another 
destitute damsel, who was generally addressed as Miss Carmichael, 
but whom her generous host called Polly. An old quack doctor 
named Levett, who bled and dosed coal heavers and hackney 
coachmen, and received for fees crusts of bread, bits of bacon, 
glasses of gin, and sometimes a little copper, completed this 
strange menagerie. All these poor creatures were at constant 
war with each other and with Johnson's negro servant Frank. 
Sometimes, indeed, they transferred their hostilities from the serv- 
ant to the master, complained that a better table was not kept 
for them, and railed or maundered till their benefactor was glad 
to make his escape to Streatham, or to the Mitre Tavern. i And 
yet he, who was generally the haughtiest and most irritable of 
mankind, who was but too prompt to resent anything which 
looked hke a slight on the part of a purse-proud bookseller, or of 
a noble and powerful patron, bore patiently from mendicants, 
who but for his bounty must have gone to the workhouse, in- 
sults more provoking than those for which he had knocked down 
Osborne,^ and bidden defiance to Chesterfield. Year after year 
Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Desmoulins, Polly and Levett, continued 
to torment him and to live upon him. 

^ U The course of life which has been described was interrupted in 
Johnson's sixty-fourth year by an important event. He had 
early read an account of the Hebrides, and had been much in- 
terested by learning that there was so near him a land peopled 
by a race which was still as rude and simple as in the middle 
ages.^ A wish to become intimately acquainted with a state of 

1 The celebrated tavern in Fleet Street, London, where Boswell and 
Johnson frequently met, and where they planned the famous tour to the 
Hebrides. 

2 Thomas Osborne, a bookseller in Gray's Inn, satirized in the Dunciad 
(Rook II. 167). " He was impertinent to me," said Johnson, " and I beat 
him. But it was not in his shop; it was in my own chamber." 

3 The middle ages include the interval from the close of the fourth 
century to the middle of the fifteenth century, when the modern era 
began. 



"^60 A/ACACLAV. 

V ^ society so utterly unlike all that he had ever seen, frequently 
X-r^ crossed his mind. But it is not probable that his curiosity would 
\^ have overcome his habitual sluggishness and his love of the 
smoke, the mud, and the cries of London, liad not Boswell im- 
jiortuned him to attempt the adventure, and offered to be his 
scpiire.' At length, in August, 1773, Johnson crossed the High- 
land line, and plunged courageously into what was then consid- 
ered, by most Englishmen, as a dreary and perilous wilderness. 
After wandering about two months through the Celtic ^ region, 
sometimes in rude boats which did not protect him from the rain, 
and sometimes on small shaggy ponies which could hardly bear 
his weight, he returned to his old haunts with a mind full of new 
images and new theories. During the following vear he employed 
himself in recording his adventures. About the beginning of 
1775, his "Journey to the Hebrides" was published, and was, 
during some weeks, the chief subject of conversation in all circles 
in which any attention was paid to literature. The book is still 
read with pleasure. The narrative is entertaining ; the specula- 
tions, whether sound or unsound, are always ingenious ; and the 
style, though too stiff and pompous, is somewhat easier and more 
graceful than that of his early writings. His prejudice against 
the Scotch had at length become little more than matter of jest ; 
and whatever remained of the old feeling hatl been effectually 
removed by the kind and respectful hospitality with which he had 
been received in every part of Scotland. It was, of course, not 
to be expected that an Oxoruan Tory should praise the Presby- 
terian polity and ritual, or that an eye accustomed to the hedge- 
rows and parks of England should not be struck by the bareness 
of Berwickshire and P^ast Lothian.'' But even in censure John- 
son's tone is not unfriendly. The most enlightened Scotchmen, 

1 A term of chivalry for an attendant on a kniy;lu ; used liere in tlie gen- 
eral sense of " escort." 

2 Tlie Higlilanders of Scotland are called " Celtic" from the kinship of 
their language to that of the Irish, the Welsh, and the Britons. 

2 Counties in southeastern Scotland, 



THE LIFE OF SAMLFiL JOUXSOX. 6i 

witli Lord Mansfield ^ at their head, were well pleased. But some 
foolish and ignorant Scotchmen wei'e moved to anger by a little 
unpalatable truth which was mingled with much eulogy, and as- 
sailed him whom they chose to consider as the enemy of their 
country with libels much more dishonorable to their country than 
anything that he had ever said or written. They published para- 
graphs in the newspapers, articles in the magazines, sixpenny 
pamphlets, five-shilling books. One scribbler abused Johnson 
for being blear-eyed ; another for being a pensioner ; a third 
informed the world that one of the doctor's uncles had been 
convicted of felony in Scotland, and had found that there was 
in that country one tree capable of supporting the weight of an 
Englishman. Macpherson,- whose " Fingal " had been proved 
in the "Journey" to be an impudent forgery, threatened to take 
vengeance with a cane. The only eflfect of this threat was that 
Johnson reiterated the charge of forgery in the most contemptuous 
terms, and walked about, during some time, with a cudgel, which, 
if the impostor had not been too wise to encounter it, would 
assuredly have descended upon him, to borrow the sublime 
language of his own epic poem, "like a hammer on the red son 
of the furnace." 

Of other assailants, Johnson took no notice whatever. He had 
early resolved never to be drawn into controversy ; and he 
adhered to his resolution with a steadfastness which is the more 
extraordinary because he was, both intellectually and morally, of 
the stufif of which controversialists are made. In conversation, 
he was a singularly eager, acute, and pertinacious disputant. 
When at a loss for good reasons, he had recourse to sophistry ; 
and when heated by altercation, he made unsparing use of sarcasm 

1 A celebrated jurist and statesman {1705-93). 

2 James Macpherson (1736-96) published some poems, including the 
epic Fingal, which professed to be translations of the works of Ossian, a 
Gaelic bard of the third century. The modern opinion is, that these " relics 
of ancient Celtic literature " were largely original with Macpherson. (See 
" Macpherson," in Dictionary of National Biography.) 



62 MACAULAY. 

and invective. But when he took his pen in his hand, his whole 
character seemed to be changed. A hundred bad writers misrep- 
resented him and reviled him ; but not one of the hundred could 
boast of having been thought by him worthy of a refutation, or 
even oi a retort. The Kenricks, Campbells, MacNicols, and Hen- 
dersons did their best to annoy him, in the hope that he would 
give them importance by answering them. But the reader will 
in vain search his works for any allusion to Kenrick ^ or Camp- 
bell,2 to MacNicoP or Henderson.'^ One Scotchman, bent on 
vindicating the fame of Scotch learning, defied him to the com- 
bat in a detestable Latin hexameter — 

" Maxime, si tu vis, cupio contendere tecum." ^ 

But Johnson took no notice of the challenge. He had learned, 
both from his own observation and from literary history, in which 
he was deeply read, that the place of books in the public esti- 
mation is fixed, not by what is Avritten about tliem, but by what 
is written in them ; and that an author whose works are likely 
to live is very unwise if he stoops to wrangle with detractors 
whose works are certain to die. He always maintained that 
fame was a shuttlecock, which could be kept up only by being 
beaten back, as well as beaten forward, and which would soon 
fall if there were only one battledoor. No saying was oftener in 
his mouth than that fine apothegm of Bentley,^ that no man was 
e\er written down but by himself. 

Unhappily, a few months after the appearance of the " Journey 
to the Hebrides," Johnson did what none of his envious assailants 

1 Dr. William Kenrick (died, 1779), a vulgar s.atirist, who savagely attacked 
Johnson's Shakespeare. 

2 Archibald Campbell, a Scotch purser in the navy, who satirized John- 
son's style under the title of Lexiphanes. 

3 Rev. Donald MacNicoI, who published a scurrilous volume on Johnson's 
Journey to the Hebrides. 

* Dr. Andrew Henderson, who likewise criticised Johnson's Journey. 

5 " I desire especially, if you wish, to contend with you." 

6 Richard Bentley (i 662-1 742), famuus classical scholar. 



THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON. 63 

could have done, and to a certain extent succeeded in writing 
himself down. The disputes between England and her American 
Colonies had reached a point at which no amicable adjustment 
was possible. Civil war was evidently impending ; and the min- 
isters seem to have thought that the eloquence of Johnson might 
with advantage be employed to inflame the nation against the 
opposition here, and against the rebels beyond the Atlantic. He 
had already written two or three tracts in defense of the foreign 
and domestic policy of the government ; and those tracts, thougli 
hardly worthy of him, were much superior to the crowd of 
pamphlets which lay on the counters of Almon ^ and Stockdale. 
But his " Taxation no Tyranny " 2 was a pitiable failure. The 
very title was a silly phrase, which can have been recommended 
to his choice by nothing but a jingling alliteration which he ought 
to have despised. The arguments were such as boys use in 
debating societies. The pleasantry was as awlcAvard as the gam- 
bols of a hippopotamus. Even Boswell was forced to own that 
in this imfortunate piece he could detect no trace of his master's 
powers. The general opinion was, that the strong faculties which 
had produced the Dictionary and the " Rambler " were begin- 
ning to feel the effect of time and of disease, and that the old 
man would best consult his credit by writing no more. 

But this was a great mistake. Johnson had failed, not because 
his mind was less vigorous than when he wrote " Rasselas " in 
the evenings of a week, but because he had foolishly chosen, 
or suffered others to choose for liim, a subject such as he would 
at no time have been competent to treat. He was in no sense a 
statesman. He never willingly read, or thought, or talked about, 
affairs of state. He loved biography, literary history, the history 
of manners ; but political history was positively distasteful to him. 
The question at issue between the Colonies and the mother 
country was a question about which he had really nothing to say. 

1 John Almon {1737-1805), bookseller and journalist; friend of John 
Wilkes. 

2 Published in 1775. 



ri 



64 MACAL-LAY. 

He failed, therefore, as the greatest men must fail when they 
attempt to do that for which they are unfit ; as Burke would have 
failed if Burke had tried to write comedies like those of Sheri- 
dan ; 1 as Reynolds would have failed if Re}'TioIds had tried to 
paint landscapes like those of Wilson. "-^ Happily, Johnson soon 
had an opportunity of proving most signally that his failure was 
not to be ascribed to intellectual decay. 

]-' On Easter Eve, 1777, some persons, deputed by a meeting 
w^hich consisted of forty of the first booksellers in London, called 
upon him. Though he had some scruples about doing business 
at that season, he received his visitors with much civility. They 
came to inform him that a new edition of the English poets, from 
Cowley downwards, was in contemplation, and to ask him to 
furnish short biographical prefaces. He readily undertook the 
task, a task for which he was preeminently qualified. His knowl- 
edge of the literary history of England since the Restoration was 
imrivaled. That knowledge he had derived partly from books, 
and partly from sources which had long been closed : from old 
Grub Street traditions ; from the talk of forgotten poetasters and 
pamphleteers who had long been lying in parish vaults ; from the 
recollections of such men as Gilbert Walmesley, who had con- 
versed with the wits of Button ; ^ Gibber,"* who had mutilated the 
plays of two generations of dramatists ; Orrery,^ who had been 
admitted to the society of Swift ; " and Savage,'^ who had ren- 
dered services of no very honorable kind to Pope. The biog- 

1 Richard Brinsley Butler Sheridan (1751-1816), noted dr.imatist and 
Whig politician ; author of School for Scandal. 

2 Richard Wilson (1714-82), one of the original members of the Rt)yal 
Academy. 

3 A famous coffeehouse in Queen Anne's time, frequented hy Addison 
nn<l his associates. 

< Coiley Cibber (1671-1757), actor and dramatist; poet laureate. Among 
the Inlays he altered were Richard III. and King Lear. 

5 John Boyle (1707-62), Earl of Orrery; author of a Life of Swift. 

fi Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), greatest of English satirists ; author of Tale 
of a Tub and (luliiver's Travels. 7 Sec Note 4, p. 35. 



i 



THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON. 65 

rapher, therefore, sat down to his task with a mind full of 
matter. He had at first intended to give only a paragraph to 
every minor poet, and only four or five pages to the greatest 
name. But the flood of anecdote and criticism overflowed the 
narrow channel. The work, which was originally meant to consist 
only of a few sheets, swelled into ten volumes, — small volumes, 
it is true, and not closely printed. The first four appeared in 
1779, the remaining six in 1781. 

The " Lives of the Poets " are, on the whole, the best of John- 
son's works. The narratives are as entertaining as any novel, 
llie remarks on life antl on human nature are eminently shrewd 
and profound. The criticisms are often excehent, and, even 
when grossly and provokingly unjust, well deserve to be studied ; 
for, however erroneous they may be, they are never silly. They 
are the judgments of a mind trammeled by prejudice, and defi- 
cient in sensibihty, but vigorous and acute. They, therefore, 
generally contain a portion of valuable truth which deserves to 
be separated from the alloy ; and at the very worst they mean 
something, — a praise to which much of what is called criticism 
in our time has no pretensions. 

Savage's " Life " Johnson reprinted nearly as it had appeared 
in 1 744. Whoever, after reading that life, will turn to the other 
lives, will be struck by the difference of style. Since Johnson had 
been at ease in his circumstances, he had written little and had 
talked much. When, therefore, he, after the lapse of years, 
resumed his pen, the mannerism which he had contracted while 
he was in the constant habit of elaborate composition was less 
perceptible than formerly ; and his diction frequently had a col- 
loquial ease which it had formerly wanted. The improvement 
may be discerned by a skillful critic in the "Journey to the 
Hebrides;" and in the "Lives of the Poets" is so obvious, that 
it cannot escape the notice of the most careless reader. 

Among the Hves the best are, perhaps, those of Cowley,^ 

1 Abraham Cowley (1618-67), essayist and poet of the so-called "meta- 
physical school," deemed in his' day a better poet than Milton. 

5 



66 J/ACArL.tV. 

Dryden,! and Pope. The very worst is, beyond all doubt, that 
of Gray.- 

This great work at once became popular. There was, indeed, 
much just and much unjust censure ; but even those who were 
loudest in blame were attracted by the book in spite of them- 
selves. Malone 3 computed the gains of the publishers at five or 
six thousand pounds. But the writer Avas very poorly remu- 
nerated. Intending at first to write very short prefaces, he had 
stipulated for only two hundred guineas. The booksellers, when 
they saw how far his performance had surpassed his promise, 
added only another hundred. Indeed, Johnson, though he did 
not despise, or affect to despise, money, and though his strong 
sense and long experience ought to have qualified him to protect 
his own interests, seems to have been singularly unskillful and 
unlucky in his literary bargains. He was generally reputed the 
first English writer of his time ; yet several writers of his time 
sold their copyrights for sums such as he never ventured to ask. 
To give a single instance, Robertson ■* received four thousand five 
hundred pounds for the " History of Charles V. ;" ^ and it is no 
disrespect to the memory of Robertson to say that the " History 
of Charles V." is both a less valuable and a less amusing book 
than the " Lives of the Poets." 

Johnson was now in his seventy-second year. The infirmities 
of age were coming fast upon him. That inevitable event of 
which he never thought without horror was brought near to him ; 
and his whole life was darkened by the shadow of death. He 
had often to pay the cruel price of longevity. Every year he 
lost what could never be replaced. The strange dependents to 

1 John Dryden (1631-1700), poet and satirist; author of Absalom and 
Achitophel and of Hind and Panther. 

2 Thomas Gray (1716-71), author of the poems tlie Bard and the Elegy; 
one of the most learned men of his time. 

3 Edmund Malone (1741-1812), scholar and Shakespearean critic. He 
edited several editions of Boswell's Johnson. 

* Dr. William Robertson (1721-93), a Scottish historian. 

5 Emperor Charles V. (1500-58) of the Holy Roman Empire. 



THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON. 67 

whom he had given shelter, and to whom, in spite of their faults, 
he was strongly attached by habit, dropped off one by one ; and 
in the silence of his home he regretted even the noise of their 
scolding matches. The kind and generous Thrale was no^more; 
and it would have been well if his wife had been laid beside 
him. But she survived to be the laughingstock of those who 
had envied her, and to draw, from the eyes of the old man who 
had loved her beyond anything in the world, tears far more bit- 
ter than he would have shed over her grave. With some esti- 
mable and many agreeable qualities, she was not made to be 
independent. The control of a mind more steadfast than her own 
was necessary to her respectability. While she was restrained 
by her husband, — a man of sense and firmness, indulgent to her 
taste in trifles, but always the undisputed master of his house, 
— her worst offenses had been impertinent jokes, white lies, 
and short fits of pettishness ending in sunny good humor. But 
he was gone ; and she was left an opulent widow of forty, with 
strong sensibility, volatile fancy, and slender judgment. She 
soon fell in love with a music master ^ from Brescia,- in whom 
nobody but herself could discover anything to admire. Her 
pride, and perhaps some better feelings, struggled hard against 
this degrading passion ; but the struggle irritated her nerves, 
soured her temper, and at length endangered her health. Con- 
scious that her choice was one which Johnson could not approve, 
she became desirous to escape from his inspection. Her manner 
towards him changed. She was sometimes cold, and sometimes 
petulant. She did not conceal her joy when he left Streatham ; 
she never pressed him to return ; and if he came unbidden she 
received him in a manner which convinced him that he was no 
longer a welcome guest. He took the very intelligible hints 
which she gave. He read, for the last time, a chapter of the 
Greek Testament in the library which had been formed by him- 
self. In a solemn and tender prayer, he commended the house 

1 Piozzi (see note, p. 57). 

2 Capital of province of Brescia, Italy, at the foot of the Alps. 



68 MACAULAY. 

and its inmates to the Divine protection, and with emotions 
wliich choked his voice, and convulsed his powerful frame, left 
forever that beloved home for the gloomy and desolate house 
behind Fleet Street, where the few and evil days which still 
remained to him were to run out. Here, in June, 1783, he had 
a paralytic stroke, from which, howe\-er, he recovered, and which 
does not appear to have at all impaired his intellectual faculties. 
But other maladies came thick upon him. His asthma tor- 
mented him day and night. Dropsical symptoms made their ap- 
pearance. While sinking under a complication of diseases, he 
heard that the woman whose friendship had been the chief hap- 
I)iness of sixteen years of his life had mairied an Italian fiddler,^ 
that all London was crying shame upon her, and that the news- 
papers and magazines were filled with allusions to the Ephesian 
matron - and the two pictures in " Hamlet." ^ He vehemently said 
that he would try to forget her existence. He never uttered her 
name. Every memorial of her which met his eye he flung into 
the fire. She, meanwhile, fled from the laughter and hisses of 
her countrymen and countrywomen to a land where she was im- 
known, hastened across Mount Cenis,"^ and learned, while passing 
a merry Christmas of concerts and lemonade parties at Milan, 
that the great man with whose name hers is inseparably asso- 
ciated had ceased to exist. 

He had, in spite of much mental and much bodily affliction, 
clung vehemently to life. The feeling described in that fine but 
gloomy paper which closes the series of his " Idlers " seemed to 

1 For a more tolerant opinion of Mrs. Thrale's conduct, see Leslie 
Stephens's Life of Johnson: " She lived iiappily witli Piozzi, and never had 
cause to regret her marriage." 

2 A character in a Latin novel hy Petronius (Arbiter), who died about 
A.D. 66. 

3 The pictures of his father and his uncle that Hamlet shows the Queen — 

" Look here, upon this picture, and on this ; 
The counterfeit presentment of two brothers." — Act iii. sc. 4. 

* A mountain puss in the -Alps, 6,775 ^^^^ above the level of the sea. 



THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON. 69 

grow stronger in him as his last hour drew near. -He fancied 
that he should be able to draw his breath more easily in a south- 
ern climate, and would probably have set out for Rome and 
Naples, but for his fear of the expense of the journey. That ex- 
pense, indeed, he had the means of defraying ; for he had laid up 
about two thousand pounds, the fruit of labors which had made 
the fortune of several publishers. But he was unwilling to break 
in upon this hoard, and he seems to have wished even to keep its 
existence a secret. Some of his friends hoped that the govern- 
ment might be induced to increase his pension to six hundred 
pounds a year ; but this hope was disappointed, and he resolved 
to stand one English winter more. That winter was his last. 
His legs grew weaker ; his breath grew shorter ; the fatal water 
gathered fast, in spite of incisions which he — courageous against 
pain, but timid against death — urged his surgeons to make deeper 
and deeper. Though the tender care which had mitigated his 
sufferings during months of sickness at Streatham was withdrawn, 
he was not left desolate. The ablest physicians and surgeons 
attended him, and refused to accept fees from him. Burke 
parted from him with deep emotion. Windham ^ sat much in the 
sick room, arranged the pillows, and sent his own servant to 
watch at night by the bed. Frances Burney,^ whom the old man 
had cherished with fatherly kindness, stood weeping at the door ; 
while Langton, whose piety eminently qualified him to be an 
adviser and comforter at such a time, received the last pressure 
of his friend's hand within. When at length the moment, dreaded 
through so many years, came close, the dark cloud passed away 
from Johnson's mind. His temper became unusually patient and 
gentle ; he ceased to think with terror of death and of that which 
lies beyond death ; and he spoke much of the mercy of God 
and of the propitiation of Christ. In this serene frame of mind 
he died on the 13th of December, 1784. He was laid, a week 

1 William Windham (1750-1810), politician and parliamentary orator. 

2 Frances Biirney (Madame D'Arblay) (1752-1840), author of Evelina 
and Cecilia (see Macaulay's Madame D'Arblay). 



70 MACAULAV. 

later, in Westminster Abbey,' among the eminent men of whom 
he had been the historian, — Cowley and Denham,^ Dryden and 
Congreve,^ Gay, Prior,-* and Addison. 

Since his death, the popularity of his works — the " Lives of the 
Poets," and, perhaps, the "Vanity of Human Wishes," excepted 
— has greatly diminished. His Dictionary has been altered by 
editors till it can scarcely be called his. An allusion to his 
"Rambler" or his "Idler" is not readily apprehended in liter- 
ary circles. The fame even of " Rasselas " has grown somewhat 
dim. But, though the celebrity of the writings may have declined, 
the celebrity of the writer, strange to say, is as great as ever. 
Boswell's book has done for him more than the best of his own 
books could do. The memory of other authors is kept ahve by 
their works ; but the memory of Johnson keeps many of his 
works alive. The old philosopher is still among us in the brown 
coat with the metal buttons, and the shirt which ought to be 
at wash, blinking, puffing, rolling his head, drumming with his 
fingers, tearing his meat like a tiger, and swallowing his tea in 
oceans. No human being who has been more than seventy 
years in the grave is so well known to us. And it is but just to 
say, that our intimate acquaintance with what he would himself 
have called the anfractuosities of his intellect and of his temper 
serves only to strengthen our conviction that he was both a great 
and a good man. 

1 Westminster Abbey (Westminster, London) is famous as the chief 
burial place of England's distinguished men. Poets' Corner records many 
of the most famous names in English literature. 

2 Sir John Denham (1615-68), author of Cooper's Hill. 

3 William Congreve (1670-1729), eminent dramatist; author of Double 
Dealer, Old Bachelor, and Mourning Bride. 

^ Matthew Prior (1664-1721), wit, poet, and diplomatist. With Montague 
he wrote the City and Country Mouse, a jiarody on Dryden's Hind and 
Panther. See Thackeray's English Humorists (Swift, Addison, Steele, 
Congreve, Prior, Pope, and others). 



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